Danny Boy
by Meriem Clayton
Summary: Jack and Sam raised Daniel's son, Danny, found when Daniel disappeared. When Daniel is found, not aged or remembering the last 17 years. he must adjust to fatherhood, his newfound love with Sam, divorced from Jack, and the mystery of Danny's mother.
1. Chapter 1

This story was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt has been made to copyright any characters which may not have been originally created by the author, and no profit is made from this work of fiction. Any original characters and the stories themselves are the property of the author.

Thanks to my wonderful betas, Jess and Monica, and to anyone who provides feedback but not sufficient information to thank you one-to-one.

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The two girls were eating their lunches, sitting on a wall next to the parking lot when he drove up. If he had a daughter, she definitely wouldn't have been allowed out of the house in either of their outfits. They ignored him as he got out of his car and started to walk towards the school. When he heard his son's name, he kept his eyes straight ahead but he slowed down a little.

"Danny Jackson is absolutely hot," the blonde said. "He can really play the guitar too. His band played at that party I went to at Jenny Meyer's last Friday and it was unbelievable. I can hardly pay attention in Civics with him two rows over from me."

Her friend agreed. "He's got to be the only boy I've ever seen who manages attitude and bad boy charm with glasses. I mean not dark glasses but like real glasses."

"Could you talk to him for me?" the blonde asked, "You know, see if he's noticed me?"

At this point, he had to drop the envelope he was carrying to manufacture an excuse to keep from walking out of earshot.

Her friend snorted. "No offense, Meagan, but you're in AP classes. Danny likes them dumb. Besides, he's a pothead. I heard the coach is threatening to kick him off the soccer team, even though he's one of the best players, over his party hearty act and his crappy grades. You don't need that kind of trouble."

He couldn't believably delay in their vicinity any longer and, at this point, he didn't really want to hear any more anyway. He climbed the short flight of concrete steps and walked through a crowd of teens on their lunch break to enter the front doors. Immediately inside the door, he almost ran into a group of boys swaggering along the hallway, his son the clear leader.

"Hey, Dad, am I in trouble?" Danny asked his father, not sounding at all concerned.

Jack O'Neill grabbed his son's shoulder and steered him away from his friends. He handed the enveloped to him and said, "What do you think, Danny?"

"You want I should like read this?" Danny asked, playing dumb. He had learned this deliberately thick routine from his father and the student had far surpassed the master.

"Maybe you don't need to. You can probably guess why I'd be asked to come in and talk to the guidance counselor."

"Actually, Dad, there are so many possibilities that it would be a crapshoot trying to pick the right one," Danny said, defiance in his eyes. "Is Mom coming in too?"

"You'd know better than I would," Jack said bitterly. The only thing in worse shape than his kid was his marriage. Samantha Carter-O'Neill had moved out six months before and filed for a divorce that would be final in a matter of weeks. Practically the only communication he had with her was through her attorney or relayed through Danny.

They stared at each other for a moment. Usually when Jack looked at Danny, he didn't see the boy's biological father at all, even though the physical resemblance, if you corrected for the piercing and the sneer, was uncanny. But right now, under all the cockiness, he saw, just for a moment, the shadow of the man he had loved like a brother. The loss still had the power to feel a little like a mule kick. It took the fight out of him and he said, very flatly and unemotionally, "Just come straight home after practice and don't plan on leaving again until you go to school in the morning." He started to walk away but turned back toward Danny to make eye contact. He sounded like the general he had once been when he said, "Do I have your word on that?"

Danny couldn't help feeling a twinge of pain seeing his father pull into himself and thinking he was the cause. It showed fleetingly in his eyes and he said, the attitude temporarily gone, "Yes, sir."

Jack nodded and walked off. Danny stood looking after him until he rounded the corner and then smashed his fist into the locker bank next to him.

Jack was on his way back to the car, passing the spot where his son's admirers had been sitting, when his cell rang. "O'Neill," he answered economically.

"General O'Neill, it's General Talbot at Cheyenne Mountain."

Jack was frankly astonished. Against all odds the Stargate Program was still a secret from the general public. He and his wife were both retired from active duty and the Stargate just wasn't part of his life. When it intruded like this, it seemed vaguely unreal. "What can I do you for?" he asked.

"I understand that you and your wife adopted Dr. Daniel Jackson's son when he was a baby."

"Yes. Danny was just a few months old when Teal'c found him on P2H997." Jack wasn't getting good vibes. "General, what is this about?"

"I'll get right to the point then. Dr. Jackson came through the gate last week. We're sure it's him. We did a DNA test."

"Was there a question as to his identity?" Jack asked too stunned at this point to feel elated at the return of the prodigal. An immediate DNA test seemed extreme.

"Yes, actually there was. You see, General, Dr. Jackson hasn't aged. At all. Not only that, as far as his memories go, he thinks he's only been gone a week. It's as if he's been in suspended animation somewhere."

Jack said, "There's no explanation?"

General Talbot laughed ruefully. "We've done every test we can think of. Dr. Jackson has been cross-examined more than OJ Simpson. I've had a room full of my best and brightest brainstorming this for days. We are coming up empty. I'll be honest with you, General. I don't trust Dr. Jackson to really be what he seems to be. But I have no grounds for keeping him here. My thought is that if he really is who he appears to be, he has every right to see his son. If he isn't, you may be able to get enough information to figure out what's going on."

Jack interjected while Talbot was finishing his last sentence. "Wait. Wait just one minute. My kid is not going to be put at risk to support some government spook activity."

"General, you have no choice. Dr. Jackson is within his legal rights to want to see a son he never surrendered for adoption. One of my officers will be bringing him to your home this evening at 1900 hours."

When Danny came home, he found his father sitting in a chair in the living room. The TV wasn't on, he wasn't reading the paper, and he didn't even have a beer in his hand. He was just sitting. "Dad, the guidance counselor couldn't have said anything that bad," Danny said, feeling really uneasy. Had something happened to his Mom?

"Danny, sit down," Jack said coming to life, or a semblance of it. "Sit," he repeated more emphatically.

"I had a call from the Air Force today," Jack began.

Danny looked at his vigorous but undeniably elderly father. "They can't be recalling you to active duty," he said incredulously. "You're like WAY too old. WAY, WAY too old. I mean, that's crazy."

"Danny," Jack said, "Your father could really run on at the worst times. Daniel just didn't have the sense God gave a crawdad about when to shut up. As much as I miss him, he was actually a royal pain in the ass. I haven't seen that much of him in you up to now but maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. Now, please be quiet and listen to me."

Danny's mouth was hanging open. His parents never talked about his real father and he never asked, although they continued to use the last name of Jackson for him. As far as the name went, his mother said once that she felt like Daniel Jackson had a right to leave something behind. But the name was almost all he knew.

"Dad, what's going on?"

"We thought your real father was dead. But it turns out he was only missing. Danny, he's coming here in, oh," Jack looked at his watch, "an hour and a half."

Danny, for once, had nothing to say. He tried a couple of times but couldn't get a sentence out. Jack said, "I know. It's a lot to process. You've got to have questions though and I have more to tell you." Jack was being pushed way out of his comfort zone for the touchy feely but giving it an honest try. "Let's talk about it." Danny just shook his head and almost ran up the stairs to his room.

Jack heard the door slam and could bet that the boy had immediately picked up the phone to call almost anyone. It seemed that everyone in the world was easier to talk to these days than his father. And how much longer would he even be that?

He continued to sit in the chair. It made as much sense as anything else he could think of to do. Sometime later he heard the front door open. Surely Daniel would knock? That question was answered immediately when Sam came into the living room. She said fairly calmly, "Jack, Danny called me. He asked me to be here when Daniel came." But then she couldn't contain it any more. "Oh Jack, isn't it wonderful! After all this time, he's alive! I can't wait to see him. Can you?"

Jack looked at her with narrowed eyes and his mouth set in a hard line. "All of a sudden you're a regular Chatty Kathy. We have hardly talked since you loaded your wagons and headed out. And here you are, bubbling over like a cheerleader, because the man you DIDN'T marry is coming back."

Sam just looked at Jack, then sighed and went to the foot of the stairs. She didn't need to call Danny because he was already on his way down. She hugged him fiercely and then pulled him into the living room. "Danny, your dad and I have done you a real disservice by not telling you much about Daniel. It's complicated but we were wrong and we owe you an apology." She looked at Jack, sprawled in the armchair.

"Hey, there is no 'we' any more. You just keep going. I'll say my piece when you get done."

Sam bit her lip but went on. "Daniel Jackson was," she stopped and laughed happily, "IS the most brilliant man I've ever known. You do know he has two Ph.D.s and some miscellaneous Masters degrees but it isn't just academic brilliance. And that isn't what made us care so much about him anyway. He was, is, so compassionate and caring. It makes so much difference to him that people's rights and feelings be considered." Her voice was getting softer and she seemed to be talking as much to herself as to Danny. "He is, damn it, I don't know a better word, really sweet. Kind and gentle but at the same time, he learned to be a really fine soldier. This slightly geeky guy who got very buff and learned to kick ass with the best of them."

Danny was dumbfounded. The expression on his mother's face was almost dreamy. "My real dad was 'buff?' Mom, were you like, involved, with him before you married Dad?"

Jack sat up abruptly. "When I think about the crap you've given me for insensitivity and not being in touch with my feelings, Sam." He let a silence stretch out for a moment. "Let's hear the answer to the boy's question."

With exquisite timing, the doorbell rang. They all froze in place. Sam was the first to recover. She ran to the door and pulled it open. Daniel Jackson stood uncertainly on the threshold. He smiled tentatively when he saw Sam and she suddenly felt very unsure. Did he even recognize her? Her hair didn't have any grey in it and she had kept herself trim through diet and working out but she was still, undeniably, a fiftyish woman and when last he had seen her, she had been in her late thirties. She was struck by the fact that he didn't look a day older. They must have incredible gyms wherever he had been. "Oh, Danny," she said, on the edge of tears, "it's so good to see you."

A beautiful smile broke over his handsome face and they reached for each other for a hug at the same time. "It feels like I just saw you a couple of weeks ago but I know it isn't the same for you. They told me you and Jack were married. Wow. I was afraid you didn't really remember me any more," he said. He saw her uncomprehending expression. "They told you, right, that for me, that's all the time that has elapsed, a couple of weeks? The doctors say that physically I don't seem to have aged much either."

She looked towards the curb where an Air Force officer was leaning against a car. "They didn't tell me anything." She pulled him into the house. "First, there's someone you need to meet."

He resisted going any further than the hall. "My son, right? I couldn't believe it but they said after Teal'c found him when he was looking for me, they did DNA testing. Sam, what should I know? I mean, how…" he trailed off, at a loss.

Sam said, "Jack and I have raised him as our own. We love him with all our hearts. He's a great kid but he's going through a difficult phase right now. The divorce has been hard on him and he and Jack were having typical teenager father-son conflicts before that."

Daniel said, "The divorce?"

Sam brushed it aside, "Daniel, be patient with him. This has all just been dumped on him, on all of us. But we'll get through it. Come on." And she led the way into the living room.

Danny and Jack were standing facing the door. Danny made a sort of strangled sound when he saw the man with his mother. He had the heavier frame of a mature man, the hair was different, but it was a little like looking in a mirror. A huge smile broke over Jack's face. Regardless of the strains with Sam, this was Daniel after all. A man who had been a close friend, younger brother, almost a son and he was found. No matter what General Talbot thought, this was Daniel just as he had kept him in his heart. Jack came forward and said, "God Daniel, where have you been keeping yourself," grabbed his proffered hand, and pulled him into a brief hug. The three adults now turned toward Danny.

"Danny," Jack said, "this is your father, Dr. Daniel Jackson. Daniel, your son. We named him after you."


	2. Chapter 2

Danny and Daniel each took a few steps forward and then stopped. At first Daniel said nothing, afraid to make a wrong move and wanting to take his cue from Danny. But Danny wasn't at all sure what he wanted. He had enough trouble with one father. Now he had two to be disappointed in him. On the other hand, he had wondered about this man in his heart of hearts all his life. It was Daniel who broke the impasse. "Hi," he said softly. "This is pretty weird isn't it?"

Danny nodded, still wary. Daniel said switching to a more energetic tone, "Actually, I'm extremely hungry. If the rest of you haven't had dinner yet either, maybe we could all go get something to eat." There was universal gratitude at having something to do that could put off a conversation no one knew how to start and everyone was more than a little afraid of.

Sam elected to follow them in her car but things were still a little strained in Jack's car even without the Jack/Sam dynamic. Jack asked Daniel to suggest a restaurant and the first three he named had all gone out of business during his absence. Eventually they wound up at a steak house Jack selected where the waitress led them to a booth. There was an awkward moment before they sorted out an acceptable seating arrangement since Sam and Jack weren't going to sit together and Danny wasn't ready to sit with Daniel. Sam and Daniel ended up facing Danny and Jack and the verbal tennis match began. 

"So what's your favorite subject?" Daniel asked.

"PE," Danny said.

"I mean, really,"

"PE." Danny repeated. "So where were you?"

Daniel said, "I've been gone 17 years they tell me. But I only remember about 10 days in,' he paused very briefly, "Guatemala."

"Guatemala," Danny repeated in a dubious tone of voice. "I thought you said, Dad, that Uncle Teal'c found me in Costa Rica." Jack shrugged. What else could he do with this weak cover story?

"How come you only remember 10 days?"

"I have no idea."

Nobody said anything for a few moments.

"Do you like history?" Daniel asked, trying to pick up the threads of the conversation again.

"It's boring. We shouldn't be wasting time on dead people. We should be paying attention to what's happening now. So you have degrees in archeology and linguistics, right?"

"Right."

"So what does a linguist and an archeologist do for the Air Force?"

"Linguistics and archeology. I could make something up but I don't want to start out our relationship by lying to you. The details are classified. So what foreign language class are you taking?

"I'm taking first year Spanish."

"But you're a junior. Did you start out with some other language?"

"Actually, I flunked it last year."

Daniel looked at Jack. "Did you explore using a tutor or something?"

Jack bridled at the implied criticism. "Are you telling me how to raise my kid?"

Daniel barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes. "I'm a linguist and his mother was," Daniel cut that statement off in the middle and then resumed, "I mean, Danny, you should have inherited some ability with languages. I'm just surprised."

"Danny is an extremely talented guitarist and the best forward on the soccer team. Not everyone aspires to be a nerd," Jack snapped.

That was a real conversation stopper. Danny was staring, shell shocked, at his father's defense of him for his poor grades when the man had done nothing but ride his case about them since he got to high school. Sam was appalled. She and Jack had made a real effort, even when their marriage was falling apart, to present a unified front to Danny and set standards for his conduct. Daniel didn't appreciate having being a good student classed as being a nerd and Jack was sounding suspiciously like the kids who had bullied and taunted him when he was a brainy kid two years ahead of himself in school. Jack glared at them all truculently but inside he couldn't believe what he had just said either. He was proud of Danny's musical and athletic abilities but he was just as unhappy with Danny's performance as Daniel probably was. At the moment, he was also very angry. Where had Daniel been when Danny had turned from a sweet, bright, high achieving little boy to the surly rebel sitting next to him?

"So," said Sam attempting to defuse the situation with a complete change of subject. "Are you going back to work at Cheyenne Mountain?"

"Actually, yeah. My particular skills haven't really been made obsolete by the last 17 years of technological advances. So, they're going to have me consult with various teams. They said to take a couple of weeks and get my bearings and then come in." He looked at Danny. "I've never been a father. I'm going to need a lot of help easing into it. I'd like to spend time with you over the next couple of weeks."

Danny shrugged. "I suppose. I have a pretty heavy practice schedule with the team and my band has a major show in two weeks so I don't have a lot of free time."

Jack said, cutting off the end of Danny's response. "He's got a father, Daniel. Get to know each other but let's not be expecting Father's Day cards in the mail yet."

Daniel raised a hand in a peacemaking gesture. "Sure, Jack, sure. I didn't mean to imply anything."

Sam felt terrible about the way Jack was acting. Impulsively, she said, "Daniel, why don't you stay with me? It's crazy for you to go to a hotel. I've got a spare room in my condo. It's only about a mile from here and it'll make it easy for you to see Danny."

Jack's previous glare now escalated to a glare set on stun directed at both people across from him. His earlier delight in the return of his friend had evaporated in the face of the threat Daniel posed. He muttered, "And you won't even have to worry about washing an extra set of sheets" but Daniel was looking at Sam. Only Danny heard him and was immediately grossed out by the image.

"If that wouldn't be inconvenient for you, Sam, it would be wonderful. I do really feel sort of adrift. I will need to get some stuff. I just have these clothes and one change they gave me at Cheyenne Mountain. You guys have all my stuff right? I mean Danny would have inherited it."

He looked back at Jack and asked, "Could I swing by your place and maybe get some clothes. Jack deflated. This was not going to be easy for Daniel and it was his fault. "Actually, Daniel, we don't have any of your clothes." Daniel looked a question. "At first, sure, we kept everything. I mean you've made a REAL habit of disappearing like when you Ascended and then showing up again later."

"What's Ascended?" Danny asked.

Three pairs of eyes looked at him blankly. "If I said Ascended, I sure didn't mean to," Jack said quickly. "I meant absented."

"Dad, that isn't even a word."

"You would know?" Jack said, cuttingly. 

Daniel prompted, "You were telling me what happened to my clothes."

"Right," Jack picked up again reluctantly. "Then when we moved when Danny was about 2 we got rid of all the stuff that doesn't age well. I mean there were moth problems with your wool sweaters. Stuff like that. And then," he drew patterns with the wet rings on the table from his beer, "this last move about three years ago, I weeded it out a lot more. Just kept the stuff that I thought Danny would care about."

Daniel shrugged. "I guess that makes sense." A pretense of polite conversation resumed. Danny went to the restroom and as he came back to the booth, he hung back to see what he could hear before they noticed him.

Daniel was saying, very, very quietly, "You kept Sha're's picture, right?"

"Actually, no Daniel. I didn't. I'm sorry."

Sam was looking at him surprised now too.

"Loving Sha're was one of defining moments of my life Jack. You knew that. If you wanted Danny to ever know anything about me, to understand me, wouldn't that be important? But then I'm wondering if you did intend that he ever know about me." He clutched his hair with one hand and Danny thought there almost might be tears in his eyes. "Abydos is gone. The whole world gone. There isn't a trace of Sha're or her people. Nothing. That picture was all I had of her Jack."

Danny went back to the booth then, chewing on what Daniel had said. Daniel gave him a forced smile and said. "I'm dead tired. Sam, would you mind if we went on back to your condo now? Danny, tomorrow's Saturday. Could we maybe get together for awhile in the afternoon?" He added with exaggerated courtesy to Jack, "If that would be all right with you Jack?"

Danny nodded. This was like being pulled between his mother and father for most of his childhood. Sam made her position clear in the tug of war immediately by quickly saying," I'm SURE Jack would be just fine with that." Well, good, at least he was only going to be pulled two ways instead of three.

Daniel and Sam eased out of the booth. Daniel said to Danny, "Two then? I'll come by."

The next morning Daniel woke up to find that it was already 10:00 in the morning. Ever since his return he had been sleeping a lot but the doctors didn't know what to do with that piece of evidence. On the chair next to his bed, there was brand new clothing: jeans, a t-shirt, underwear. Sam had already gone somewhere and bought him a change of clothes. He carried them into the bathroom to take the shower he had been too tired to contemplate the night before. He found shaving gear and a new toothbrush. When he finally went into the kitchen, there was the wonderful smell of a fresh pot of coffee and a beautiful coffee cake with just a small wedge gone. Next to the coffee cake was a pile of three scrapbooks which a quick check showed documented Danny's childhood but still no Sam. She was beginning to seem like the fairy godmother. 

He began to look through the scrapbooks as he sipped his coffee. Sam appeared to have taken most of the pictures because she appeared in very few of them. Page after page made the bond between Jack and Danny very plain with pictures that showed the little boy tagging after his dad, looking up at him with love and respect, copying him. 

Sam appeared, dressed in running shorts and a tank top, as he came close to finishing the books. He cocked his head at her and said, "You wanted me to see these before we talked, didn't you?"

She laughed a little and admitted, "You found me out." She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down next to Daniel. "Look, Daniel, Jack is a very good father. The problems Danny is having are not due to a major parenting failure on Jack's part. Jack was being an ass last night because Danny is the most important thing he has left in his life. He was forced to retire when he had the heart attack and the triple by-pass. Our marriage is dead and he isn't even living in Minnesota any more." 

She sighed and broke eye contact. "There's something else. Jack is convinced that you and I … that you and I were lovers."

Daniel was in middle of a sip when she dropped that bombshell and he jerked in surprise and spilled coffee all over the counter and down his front. "Sam, these nice new clothes, thanks very much by the way, I just got coffee all over them." He was muddling around, alternating ineffectually between dabbing at his shirt and mopping at the counter with some outclassed paper napkins.

"Give me the shirt," she said.

"Huh?"

"Give me the shirt and I'll throw it in the washer immediately and it won't stain." He didn't move and she reached over and grabbed the shirt and pulled it up over his head. He got tangled in it and had no choice but to cooperate with taking it off the rest of the way. "Good," she said and went in and popped it in the washing machine.

She returned to find an uncomfortable looking, bare-chested Daniel and a wiped off counter. It was impossible to keep all appreciation for the magnificent, toned physique in front of her out of her face but she was pretty proud of how well she damped down her level of appreciation to something that shouldn't embarrass them both. 

"How could he think something like that?" Daniel asked his arm crossed over his chest. "There was never anything. I don't get it."

Sam gave him a partial answer. "He's more than 10 years older than I am. It's made him insecure whenever a man close to my own age pays attention to me. I think he started having doubts as to how attractive he was to me." 

She paused for a second and Daniel leaped into the breech. "That's crazy. Age difference doesn't matter if you care about someone. You're what, maybe 12, 13 years older than I am now; I mean if I really haven't aged. You look damn fine to me."

Daniel didn't know where that had come from and regretted it when Sam blushed, very flattered. Good lord, what must she be thinking was on his mind? Sam continued, "Thanks for the kind words. But, anyway, I told Jack that and I showed him how I felt, but he got harder and harder to convince. When I left, that's when he brought it up. That I had just married him because you were out of the picture."

Daniel closed his eyes and rubbed his face. "So now he thinks we're over here doing God knows what."

"Probably, but Daniel, I just can't care any more. I've had years of walking on egg shells and I can't do it any longer."

Daniel opened his eyes and looked at her, "What do you think Danny thinks is happening?"

Sam looked at him thunderstruck. "I'm his mother. Boys don't even want to think about their mothers having conceived them. Surely he isn't thinking anything like that."

Daniel said, "I hope not. It wouldn't help would it?"

Sam came closer and said very softly, "I have to ask you something about Danny."

Daniel nodded with a bad feeling that he wasn't going to like what he heard next. "I want to ask you to cancel your time with him this afternoon. Just back off and let him approach you. Make it clear to him that you are interested in knowing him when he's interested in knowing you but let him set the pace."

"Are you sure Sam?" he asked, searching her face? He read the certainty there without her having to say anything. "Okay, Sam. I'll play it your way."

Sam impulsively threw her arms around him and hugged him. She felt really good against his bare skin and smelled delightfully like soap, shampoo, and just a hint of something subtle and more exotic. Her hug unbalanced him a little and he hugged her back for balance. They released each other and there was an uncomfortable silence. 

"I think I should tell him this in person though," he suggested and she agreed. "Well, now I have two weeks to fill up with something to do."

"Daniel, you're going to need clothes, a place to live, something to drive. I don't have any consulting lined up for the next couple of weeks. Let me help you. I would really enjoy it."

"Are you sure Sam? I do have money. The Air Force gave me my back salary. Still, with everything you've already done, I already feel a little like a, a, um," he searched for a word.

Sam found herself mentally supplying 'boy toy' and was appalled at herself. She quickly said, "You are not an IMPOSITION. You are one of my oldest and dearest friends and it would be nice to have a good friend around when my divorce become final next week."

He looked at her with instant sympathy. He knew that even if Sam had initiated the divorce, it would be difficult to lay to rest a dead dream once and for all. "Sure, Sam, that would be absolutely great. Let's make up a list." 


	3. Chapter 3

Dressing Daniel was more fun than Sam had had in years. She wondered if the fact that she had never had Barbies and, hence no Kens, had left her with some sort of repressed urge. Fortunately, Daniel didn't mind wandering through malls with her, becoming fascinated with tribal rituals of the teens who crowded them. He was particularly interested in observing young men around his son's age. Daniel wanted a baseline to which to compare Danny. Danny had seemed fairly out there to him but he didn't know if maybe all teenaged boys were citizens of the same far country.

Daniel was willing to try on clothes if they spaced the stints in the dressing rooms with long conversations over cappuccinos, crowd watching, and an occasional movie. At the end of three leisurely days, he had a more than adequate wardrobe, heavy on blue. Sam kept it to herself but she loved how the color looked with his expressive eyes.

Their conversations, covering a wide range of scientific and philosophical topics, were profoundly satisfying for both of them. Sam had forgotten how much fun these sorts of discussions could be with someone who was able to keep up with her. Daniel loved to see her eyes light up with the excitement of an idea and hoped it would keep thoughts of the divorce at bay. They did veer off the intellectual and into the personal one day in a food court when Sam couldn't hold it in any longer and said, "Who was Danny's mother? I keep waiting for you to bring it up but you never have."

Daniel looked down at the table and started to fiddle with the packets of sweetener. "When I first came back, I laid it all out for the Air Force. The memories were so clear. There was only one woman on that planet with whom there was a, shall we say, opportunity for parenthood. It was very romantic actually. Her name was Kari. She was blonde, blue eyed, about your height and build. I can see her face really clearly and she looked enough like you to be your sister. She found me, took me back to her village, and hid me. We only had a little more than a week together but it was wonderful. She was brilliant. She peppered me with questions, hard ones, and we talked for hours. I felt like I had known her for years."

Sam touched his hand and asked, "Why wouldn't you want to talk about her now?"

"Because it clearly didn't happen," he said sadly.

"What? Why do you think that?" she asked, astounded.

"Do you remember the time that creature had me captive and had planted a false memory of my death in all of your minds so you wouldn't come looking for me?" She nodded. "You told me that even though the memory was very clear, it just didn't feel right and the feeling of not rightness got stronger with time?"

Sam picked up immediately on his point and said, "So you think this is a false, implanted memory? You feel something like what we described?"

Daniel agreed, "That, yeah, but also, think about the coincidence. I go to another planet and essentially find you? I think they pulled out your memory as the woman most on my mind and started with that. Maybe distinguishing friend from lover was too sophisticated for whatever technique they were using." 

"Or maybe," Sam thought hopefully, "you didn't know your own mind."

Daniel's analysis of his memories started so many paths of conjecture in Sam's head she had trouble concentrating for awhile. She almost talked him into a hideous kiwi colored Izod shirt before she came to her senses and got on task, remerging that the mall is no place to loose focus. Fashion disaster lurks behind every rack like boa constrictors in the Amazon.

A more unpleasant mall experience happened later the same afternoon. They were strolling through a Belk's when three teenagers started following them. Daniel and Sam stopped to look at men's cologne, Daniel telling Sam adamantly that he couldn't wear the stuff because of its effect on his allergies. Sam reassured him that she was just curious. Jack wore a little at times and she wanted to see how much it cost. She was aghast at the price per ounce. How long had she been married to the man and yet maybe she never really knew him? 

The three young men came up on either side of them at the counter. One of them started to fiddle with Sam's purse strap. She jerked it away from him and he laughed. Another knocked Daniel's wallet, which he had temporarily taken out of his pocket and laid down to extricate a list, off the counter onto the floor. "Oops," he snickered.

Sam and Daniel had both been geeky, mercilessly teased adolescents. They each flashed back to those days and were so grateful for what had changed. They had but one thought, "You have no idea what you're messing with here."

Daniel just let the wallet lie for now. He said pleasantly with something extremely deadly in his eyes, "I suggest you back off."

The ringleader said, "Really, huh? Say you know Danny Jackson by any chance because, man, you are exactly as ugly as he is?"

Suddenly, a beefy, overweight, but still impressive, mall security guard was standing behind the boy. "Pick up the man's wallet for him, Duarte," he said, obviously acquainted with the boy.

The boy sneered, hesitated a moment, but then bent over to pick up the wallet. He took advantage of the opportunity to scope out Daniel's id. Daniel saw his eyes widen as he took in the name. He now had confirmation through the identical names for the amazing physical resemblance. He handed it to Daniel accompanied by a thoroughly evil smile. Later when they were getting in the car, Daniel saw them off across the parking lot. At first he thought they were following them when Sam pulled out but he persuaded himself he was being paranoid.

It proved to be easier to get him a car than to renew the driver's license that would let him operate it. The renewal took three trips to the DMV before they managed to have all the right documentation and get there before the dedicated civil servants in charge had decided they had already given out enough tests for the day. Ten tests out at noon for a closing time of 5:00 seemed to be about their comfort level. 

By contrast, the car purchase only took an afternoon. Daniel wasn't at all one of those men who has part of his identity tied up in his car. He didn't care what color it was or what make and the stereo system or lack thereof was a matter of complete indifference. He just wanted high dependability and reasonable cargo space so that basically he could do whatever he wanted without having to think about the car at all. A single day was all the patience he had for that drill and fortunately they found one quickly and drove it off the lot after paying cash. Daniel was disappointed to find he had two flat tires the next morning. He had thought the salesman had seemed more principled but, other than that, he remained satisfied.

That was when the real challenge started -- trying to find Daniel a place to live. They lost track of how many houses they saw. Their real estate agent became increasingly disgusted with their pickiness and actually fired them after the fourth day. The day Sam's divorce became final, Daniel suggested they take a breather and do something she would think was fun. She surprised him by saying, "Do you know what would be fun? Looking at houses for me. I'm going to have to move out of that condo soon since I just sublet it for 6 months when I left Jack. I never really liked it but it was all I could find at the time. And I am even more disenchanted with it after someone egged the house last night and that snake got into the kitchen the day before that. I'd like to look at wildly inappropriate houses that I wouldn't be able to afford or wouldn't be practical and just day dream."

They found a new agent, a petite, extremely bubbly woman named Corky. Even though Corky talked so much you thought she would need to be pulling an oxygen tank around with her, there was something oddly endearing about her. Corky asked Sam a handful of questions that didn't seem heavily correlated to the house, nodded decisively, and started immediately to the first candidate. She was magical. Every house she came up with was one Sam would have loved to live in although there wasn't a one she could have persuaded herself was a responsible decision. 

Corky had gotten the impression that they were a couple. It was so hard to get a word in edgewise they gave up and let her keep her assumptions intact. As she took them to the last house for the day, she said, "This is a bit of a fixer upper but think how wonderful it will be shaping the house together into something that's a little of both of yours, almost like having a baby." Sam smiled remembering how, even though her parents loved each other dearly, they absolutely could not work on a home improvement project together. Corky's comment was one of those wonderfully romantic statements that would only resonate with someone who had never actually been in the situation. She shuddered remembering the one time she and Jack had taken on such a project. It had been closer to "Rosemary's Baby" than any loving joint creation.

The last house was in an older neighborhood on an oddly shaped lot. Even though it was surrounded by other homes, a high, handsome wood fence on one side, the slope of the land and the way the trees had grown up, put it in a little world of its own. They were falling in love with it even before they had gone through the front door. As they did the walkthrough they went from first date status with the house to a lot of heavy breathing and thoughts of a future together. Sam pulled Daniel aside, out of ear shot of the agent, and said, "I can't believe how much I want this house."

"I don't blame you," he said. "This place is absolutely perfect, isn't it? So, buy it."

"Daniel, did you see the price? Jack and I still haven't arrived at a property settlement yet. He'll have to buy my half of the Bleaker Street house first to have all of the down payment. And the monthly mortgage payments would be a little steep. Then I don't that I would have the energy by myself to do all the fixing up that needs to be done."

Daniel put his arms around her and said, gently, "You haven't had anything the way you wanted it for a really long time and neither have I. We'll buy it together and we'll both have a dream place to live in."

She was staring at him utterly shocked by his offer. All sorts of arguments crowded her head. "But, won't that cramp you? I mean, what will that do to your dating life?"

Daniel exploded in laughter. "My dating life? It's been years but surely you remember that I didn't have what you would call a dating life. But maybe you're thinking about your dating life?"

Sam said, "At this point, I can't imagine wanting to go through all that crap again. I've been married and I think nuns have it easier."

Daniel responded, serious again, "That will change, Sam. You are so beautiful and so special; you'll have so much attention I'll have to become your bodyguard. If someone does seem promising, you can make sure they know we are just housemates. Maybe hint that I'm gay. There seem to be a fair number of people willing to believe that."

"You are really good for a middle-aged woman's self-esteem, Daniel Jackson," she said huskily. How she wanted to kiss him but she knew that was a really bad idea.

Not only was the house perfect but it belonged to a motivated seller. The owner's wife had left him for a divorce lawyer who was in the process of taking him to the cleaners. They were moved in within a month. Sam kept meaning to talk to Jack about the change of address and her housemate but things were very hectic between the move and the fact that she had to go out of town in the middle of it all for about a week for some consulting work. 

Danny, of course, knew about the move, having seen the boxes and other moving preparations on his weekends with his mother but they hadn't found a way to tell him what Daniel's role was in all this. When Danny was there for the weekend, Daniel would typically go into work or take himself off somewhere else and try to stay out of the house as much as possible. Still some time together as a threesome was unavoidable. Danny was always on the edge of rudeness and had developed a real knack for asking questions that either Daniel couldn't really answer or were designed to somehow make him look inadequate. Oddly enough, though, he never asked about his mother.

Danny's only voluntary contact with his father during that time had been to invite him to a soccer game. Daniel had dutifully gone and briefly spoken to Danny after the game. Since he knew little more about soccer than any other sport, he felt completely out of his league and told Sam he thought maybe Danny had wanted it that way. There was a message there and it wasn't a friendly one. 

The night they moved in, Sam was amazed at how much trouble she was having sleeping. She had gone to sleep in unfamiliar places all over the galaxy. She had slept in situations where there was real danger only a few feet away. She had slept in captivity when they had no idea how much longer they would be alive. She thought it was ridiculous that she got so spooked the first night by some really strange noises outside and unfamiliar creaking and shifting inside the house but she was. Finally she got up off the mattress she was sleeping on in the floor in her room and went to Daniel's room. The door was partly ajar, and she thought she saw some light spilling out. She called out softly, "Daniel, Daniel, are you awake?"

There was no answer and finally she pushed the door open gently to find Daniel propped up on his mattress against the wall, asleep. Sam went softly to his side, took off his glasses, slipped the book from his hands, and turned off the little lamp sitting on the floor next to him. She pushed him over so that he was lying on his side. For just a moment, she lay down on the bed next to him and looked at his handsome face, so guileless and young. How would her life have been different if she hadn't been so blinded by her feelings for Jack that she hadn't seen the man right in front of her? As things deteriorated with Jack, she had found herself thinking more and more about Daniel but he absolutely could never know that.

Two days later, when Sam pulled into the garage, she noticed Daniel's car was already there. The surprising part was that the front end was crumpled up to where it was almost undriveable. Very worried about what might have happened to him, she hurried inside and found him sitting on the couch that sat temporarily in the middle of the living room in a sea of unpacked boxes. He had evidently found the box with the Scotch and was rolling a highball glass in his hands with little of the amber liquid left in it.

"Daniel, what happened? Are you all right? Do you have whiplash?" she asked zigzagging through the boxes to sit down next to him.

He looked down at the glass and took a minute to answer. "I rear ended a woman with a car full of kindergarteners." He looked up just long enough to reassure Sam, "Nobody was hurt in either car but her bumper and mine are a mess." He laughed humorlessly. "Those kindergarteners surely learned some new words. The woman had a mouth on her."

"Were you thinking about something to do with work? Your mind somewhere else?" Sam asked. She had certainly seen how Daniel could lose himself in an idea.

"You really want to know?" he said shooting her another quick look before looking back down at the oh so fascinating glass.

"Of course," Sam responded. Something was going on and she didn't like it.

"Well, I certainly was lost in a thought. The same kind of thought that has made my productivity go down to close to zero at Cheyenne Mountain and has generally reduced me to a zombie."

He stopped talking. This was beginning to drive Sam crazy. "And," she prompted with a trace of aggravation.

"I was thinking about you naked. I walk around thinking about you all the time, thinking about how much I want you, how much I love you."

Sam was frozen in place. He looked up at her finally, his face very serious. "I know that with the way Danny feels about me and you on the rebound from Jack, I probably don't have a chance. I didn't want to tell you either because I thought it could make it really awkward our living here together but it's making me crazy not only feeling it but having to hide it too."

"Forget Danny. That'll sort itself out. And forget Jack. That died years ago. It just took me forever to move on. But Daniel, I'm a very middle-aged woman. Thoughts of my naked body would have been pretty scary if they were accurate. At my age, things start to sag and wrinkle, no matter how much you work out. You, on the other hand, are an extremely handsome man in his prime. You'd resent me after awhile." She couldn't look at him any more and got up and walked to the window.

"The inability to handle age is a major part of what killed your marriage. Don't make Jack's mistake and let it destroy what we could have," Daniel pleaded. 

She didn't turn around. She just stood blindly staring out at a tree, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. Then he was behind her, wrapping his arms around her, resting his cheek on her hair. He whispered, "You have to let me love you or think I may just curl up and die." 


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning was a Saturday but still Sam woke up almost at first light, the sun streaming in windows that didn't have curtains or blinds yet. She was full of energy and feeling wonderful. Daniel still wasn't up by the time she showered and dressed. Instead of going downstairs she found herself going into the bedroom where he was sleeping so soundly. She sat down on the floor next to the mattress and just looked at him. She'd done this before, but she had been like the little poor match girl, freezing to death, pressed up against the shop window, yearning for the goodies on the other side she couldn't have. Now, oh how glorious! Now she could run her hand down his body, stroke his hair, drop a kiss on his cheek, on his bare shoulder, and not worry that he might wake up and catch her. She was on the other side of the glass and the goodies were hers.

He didn't really wake up but he smiled in his sleep and her energy level doubled. Sam felt like she could face anything. It was fortunate she was in that frame of mind because it was about to be tested. She had just brought the paper in and was about to make coffee when there was a knock on the door. Curious as to who it could possibly be she went to the door quickly and opened it to find a middle aged woman in pink and aqua sweets with a small dog on a leash. The moment Sam opened the door, the woman starting talking. "Hi, I'm Merilee McGovern. Daryl and I live just two doors down, the brown Tudor you know with the RV in the driveway."

Sam smiled politely. "It's nice to meet you. I'm Samantha Carter."

Merilee continued, "Anyway, I was out walking Napoleon and I saw you get the paper. Daryl always says 'There's no time like the present' so I thought I should just come right over and introduce myself and welcome you to the neighborhood." She paused and Sam had an uncomfortable feeling she was expecting to be invited in. It was just too early in the morning and she needed coffee first before getting chummy with a complete stranger.

Sam said, "That was certainly very friendly of you. This seems like such a nice neighborhood that way."

Merilee nodded vigorously, "Very 'diverse.'" For some reason, she had verbal quotation marks around that word. "Your housemate will be comfortable here. Actually, if he isn't in a relationship at the moment, there is this lovely young man who lives with his mother just over on Windmere Way that I'd be glad to introduce him to."

Sam was struggling to follow all this. "Do you, I mean, how do you, why do you .."

Merilee chuckled. "Oh my gaydar works very well. I mean, heterosexual men once they get in their late thirties have a tendency to let themselves go a little but gay men, well, let me just say that the buff physique on your housemate is what you would expect. And the two times I saw him, he was very well dressed."

Sam thought almost irrelevantly, "That's what I get for taking Daniel shopping. I set him up for a neighbor to think he's gay?" Sam asked, "So you didn't he was like my … " and she found he couldn't figure out the word to supply. Lover seemed a little tacky for polite conversation. Boyfriend seemed sort of kid like. They weren't engaged. While she was mulling that over, Merilee said, "He's so much younger than you, it just didn't occur to me."

Sam found herself thinking of the lyrics that said something about getting hit with someone's best shot but while she was still reeling, strong arms went around her middle and she was pulled back against a warm body. Daniel said with a somewhat affectedly smarmy edge to his voice, "Good morning, darling." When she looked around at him, he kissed her very thoroughly.

Merilee didn't seem to be the least bit taken aback by her obvious misjudgment. "My, I certainly got that wrong," she giggled. Noticing that Daniel seemed to be about ready to drag Sam into the house and have his way with her, Merilee winked broadly at Sam and said, "I'll just let you get back to whatever you were doing. See you later." She pulled Napoleon so hard as she took off down the walk that the poor dog could barely keep up.

"I bet she's on her way to call everyone in the neighborhood she knows," Sam said as they closed the door. She pried Daniel's arms off her and walked into the kitchen. "What a walking tribute to stereotypes she was." She pulled the coffee pot out and almost broke it putting it down so hard in the sink. "Just a little heavy on the territory marking there, weren't you Daniel. I feel something like a tree Napoleon's visited recently."

Daniel said, laughing a little, "I thought she deserved to be discomforted a little for being so wrong about everything and for that little pot shot she took at you."

"Didn't work, did it?" Sam said. "I wonder if anything gets through to that woman. I can just imagine what Daryl's like."

Daniel drew her into his arms again. "You're not letting that statement about you being older than I am bother you, are you? Please don't. Someone like Merilee will always find something. I can imagine her greeting to any new neighbors who happened to be in an interracial marriage, have a foreign accent, or be handicapped." Sam didn't answer. She was still upset.

Daniel tried a different tack. "Or maybe this has all caused you to doubt me. Maybe you need some more proof that I'm very hetero." She looked at him askance. "Tell you what. I've got an hour or so available. Let me give you another demonstration." He lifted her against him and set to work.

The day still had not run out of awkward moments. They had decided their first home improvement project would be to remove the wallpaper with little pink fishes on it that was in the first floor powder room. Neither of them liked wallpaper and Sam had a particular dislike for wallpaper themed to go with the purpose of the room. Fish in the bathroom or fruit in the kitchen just didn't work for her. They had bought a book on how to do it and set out for Home Depot to get supplies.

Home Depot was more fun than it should have been. They ended up going off task and wandering around, getting ideas for other rooms, being a little silly about it after awhile with really over the top things that neither of them would ever seriously contemplate like mirrors on the ceiling. Sam was looking at a piece of mirror tile with sort of gold veins running through it and Daniel was whispering suggestions in her ear as to what the consequences of that might be if they used it in the bedroom, when they heard Jack's voice.

They turned quickly and moved apart to see Jack and Danny at the end of the aisle. Jack was leaning against the rack on the other side of the aisle looking at them sardonically and Danny had his hands braced on their shopping cart like he was planning on ramming them with it. Jack spoke first, "Well, hello, home improvement shoppers. Planning on a bordello look for your house?" He gestured at the mirror tile.

Sam blushed. "We were just being silly." She quickly tried to redirect the conversation. "Danny, I thought the reason you couldn't spend the weekend with me this weekend was that your team was going out of town for some sort of special tournament."

Danny had the good grace to look uncomfortable and a little sheepish. "It, uh, got cancelled." 

Jack behaved like an adult at that point and said to Danny, "I don't think so. I never heard about anything out of town this weekend. You lied to your mother?"

Danny shot him a very resentful look. Clearly he thought Jack should cover for him. "I, well, I guess kind of."

Jack didn't let up. "Did you or didn't you?"

Danny admitted, "Yes I did."

Jack said, "We didn't raise you to lie. Apologize to your mother and plan on spending the next week's free evenings at home with me."

Daniel said, without ever looking up, "I'm sorry Mom."

It was just at that moment that Kathy Jaworski came around the corner. "Hey, hi guys," she greeted them enthusiastically. "It's been forever since I've seen you. I really hoped to do a better job of staying in touch with everyone after we moved out into the country last year and we quit seeing each other at the boy's soccer games."

Everyone but Daniel mumbled some sort of hi back to Kathy. She didn't seem to notice the general tension in the air. "So, how have you been and WHO is this?" she asked noticing Daniel for the first time. "You must be a relative. The resemblance is striking."

Sam collected herself and did the honors, "Kathy this is Dr. Daniel Jackson. Daniel, this is Kathy Jaworski. Her son Kyle was on the team with Danny." Daniel smiled and shook her hand.

"So you're Danny's…" Kathy waited for them to supply the right word.

"Actually I'm Danny's biological father," Daniel said. It sounded awful but what else would he call it?

"Oh," Kathy said. Obviously she felt like she had stepped in something and, unlike Merilee, it did bother her. She, however, made the mistake of trying to dig herself out of it, instead of just getting while the getting was good. "Oh, so this is your first husband?"

It was Sam's turn. "We were never married." 

"So you, oh," Kathy stuttered to a stop.

Sam couldn't leave Kathy with a mental image of Danny being illegitimate. "Danny isn't my son biologically. Jack and I adopted him when Danny's real mother couldn't raise him."

Kathy shot a quick look at Daniel which had him more than a little annoyed with Sam. Daniel thought, "Great. Now she thinks I abandoned Danny and his mother somewhere, probably threw them out in the snow."

Sam moved to tie off the bleeding since everyone else seemed to be stunned into silence except Jack who was way too clearly enjoying it. "Well, Kathy," she said energetically looking at Kathy's empty cart. "Don't let us keep you. It looks like you're just getting started. It was great running in to you. Stay in touch." Kathy agreed heartily and took off very rapidly, overjoyed to be leaving the aisle.

"More fun than I've had in Home Depot in years," Jack said.

Danny did not appreciate his father's humor. "This is just stupid. And my being Danny Jackson isn't helping. He looked at Jack, "I've decided I should use my middle name, instead of my last name. If you don't mind, I'm going to start going by Danny O'Neill."

Daniel and Sam were both hurt at not being consulted and Jack also looked discomforted. "This really isn't the place to discuss it, Danny." Seeing that Danny wasn't backing down, Jack said, "Daniel is your father. And it wasn't his fault that he wasn't around."

Daniel was touched that Jack would defend him, given the bad feeling there had been over the past few weeks. He said, "Danny, you have a right to be called whatever you want. Most people would have made your name O'Neill or Carter-O'Neill from the beginning. I really appreciate the fact that your parents didn't make that decision but I think it's your choice now. Jack, if you're comfortable with it, I don't have a problem."

That was almost the end of the most drama in a Home Depot aisle for the week, possibly for the entire month. It caused a clerk who had been just out of sight and heard the whole thing to spend way too much time lurking around aisles listening to conversations over the next few weeks. He kept hoping to luck on another so dramatic conversation but mostly heard people arguing, frequently quite nastily, which was what home improvement seemed to bring out in most marriages. He would have been even more determined to eavesdrop if he could have heard the follow on between Jack, Daniel, and Sam. 

Danny had left with their cart. He'd had enough family togetherness. Jack approached Sam and Daniel and asked, very quietly. "Has there been anything more to explain what happened to you Daniel?"

Daniel said, "Yeah. One thing. Initially they had ruled out some sort of suspended animation, being frozen you know. But they went back and looked at some data that was collected when we found that ship of people in suspended animation. You remember what I mean?"

Jack agreed, "Your massive case of multiple personalities."

Daniel continued, "Right. It looks like similar or even the same technology might have been used based on some things they saw in my biochemical work up."

Jack asked, "But you don't remember anything else?"

Daniel said, "All that's happened is that I am more and more sure that what I do remember is false, implanted."

Jack nodded then, and hit Daniel on the shoulder. "Whatever it was, at least it didn't seem to have hurt you. They'll figure it out eventually." He waved and walked off.

Sam's irritation with his enjoyment of her discomfort had vanished in that show of support. She said to Daniel, looking after him, "He was pretty great, the way he handled the lying and Danny wanting to change his name. Maybe, there is hope."

Daniel agreed, "It makes me feel better. I really want him back as friend somehow. But Sam, we've got to not queer that by waiting much longer to tell Jack and Danny that we bought the house together and that we are, well, together. What if they find it out some other way."

"I know and I will do it. But you promised me you'd let me handle it alone, at least at first." However when Danny's next weekend with his mother came up, there still haven't been any discussion about the situation. Daniel took Sam for a brief walk out of earshot from Danny and put his foot down. "Either you tell him or I will. We're on borrowed time here and it isn't going to get easier." 

Sam didn't get mad. She knew full well it had to be done. She squared her shoulders and started to walk back to the house. "Okay, I'll do it now. But you promised me you'd let me talk to him alone."

Daniel went up to the room they had made his home office and library and tried to bury himself in one of Noam Chomsky's works. Maybe it would have worked if he hadn't been able to hear the rise and fall of their voices, his son's unmistakably angry tones and Sam's increasingly strained attempt to be calm. It was enormously frustrating because while he couldn't hear most of it, he caught a word every once in awhile. Finally, he stood up, preparing to go join them, when the door burst open and Danny came roaring in, trailed by his mother.

"Who the fk do you think you are?" the boy demanded, stopping just inches short of Daniel. 

"I take it that you're asking that rhetorically?" Daniel said and then winced at sounding so professorial.

Danny threw his hands in the air and stalked across the room, turning to look furiously at both of them. "I don't need you in my life. I have a father. And I had a mother."

"HAD?" Sam tried to interject but Danny kept going.

"Until you broke up their marriage. Now you're trying to put yourself into my life even though I don't want you. Buying a house with my mother is going a little far don't you think?"

Daniel didn't know where to start. "Broke up their marriage? I was light years from here when their marriage broke up."

"Light years from here in what did you say 'Guatemala?' On top of everything else you can't tell the truth about anything."

"Trying to stay on the subject at hand," Daniel said, beginning to lose the reins of his temper, "you can't hold me responsible for what went wrong in their marriage."

"Oh can't I?" Danny asked belligerently. "You think I didn't hear them arguing and your name coming up, more than once. Maybe you weren't here but she used you as weapon against my dad."

Sam was looking ill. "Danny," she tried one last time, "that isn't what happened. Talk to your dad about it, to Jack. He'll tell you."

"Will he? He doesn't seem that strong on the truth lately either." Danny thrust his hand through his hair and clutched at it just as Daniel sometimes did. Daniel had an incongruous stray thought, "I wonder if he realizes he does that just like me?"

Danny started to attack from another direction, "Mom, are you so what pathetically desperate for sex that you're willing to make a fool over yourself over a," he floundered looking for something appropriately insulting, "a jerk you used to know just because he's younger? He better in bed than my dad?"

Daniel had heard enough. The boy could insult him all day if he chose but he was not going to put up with attacks on the woman he loved from anyone, even his son and hers. 

Daniel slammed the heavy book down on the desk next to him. He looked at Danny and it was a different man than the boy had ever seen. For the first time, he looked to Danny like someone who could be dangerous enough to be part of whatever top secret military thing it was his parents had done. Daniel said in a voice notable for the pure steel it packed, "You will not now or ever in the future talk to your mother with so little respect. Is that clear?"

He looked at Danny waiting for a response. Danny was very surprised to hear himself say, "Yes sir." For a moment, he had fathers confused. As rebellious as he had become in recent years, he had never once said anything like this in Jack's presence. He knew he would have drawn exactly the same kind of reprimand if he had.

Daniel wasn't done. "Secondly, you need to get over yourself. You are very important to your mother and, although you probably don't believe it, to me, but you are not the center of the universe. We do things for reasons that have nothing to do with you and this is one of them. Do you understand?"

Again he paused and again, Danny found himself saying, "Yes sir."

Daniel walked over to Sam and took her hand. He looked at her and said, "Sam, I can't see there being more rounds of this. I say we get everything out on the table now." She returned his gaze, still looking very unwell, and nodded. Daniel continued, "When I came back, there was nothing but a deep friendship between your mother and me. In the last few weeks, that's changed. I love her and she loves me."

Danny had a stunned and sickened expression on his face. He raised his hands to his ears and said, "I'm not listening to this any more."

Finally Sam had had enough. She dropped Daniel's hand, marched across the room, and yanked her son's hands down. Holding on to them, she said in a tone of voice that reminded them all that she too had a military background, "You WILL listen just as I've listened to your poison for the last half hour." 

Daniel said, "We think enough of you to believe that when you finish growing up, you'll understand and be fair about this. We've decided that we can't let the way you feel now stop us from being together."

Sam was holding Danny's hands but looking back at Daniel. He locked eyes with her and said, "Next weekend, we're flying to Tahoe to get married. You can come with us if you want but we're going anyway."

Sam dropped Danny's hands in shock. Ordinarily such a high handed announcement without discussing it with her beforehand would have infuriated her but she was looking deep into his eyes when he said it. It was as if she was inside his mind for a minute and saw all the love and the pain and the need to move on with their lives. She temporarily forgot Danny was even in the room and went back to Daniel.

"You're sure you want to do this?" she asked almost inaudibly. 

Daniel smiled at her, skimmed his knuckles across her cheek and then he kissed her. When he finished, he looked up at Danny. "Get used to it Danny." 

Maybe that was the moment at which Danny began to grow up. He and his father stared at each other, not as father and son, but as two men taking each other's measure. Danny didn't understand his own feelings. It seemed like a dozen different emotions were swirling through him. But one of them was a new sensation. For the first time, he felt some real respect for his biological father.

The silence seemed to stretch on for eons. At last Danny looked down and scuffed at the floor with his boots. "I don't want to be there. I'm sorry Mom but I just can't handle it. I guess I want to keep coming for the weekend." He added in a very small voice, "And I'm sorry for what I said, about you being pathetic and all. If I was not your son, I think I would think you were pretty hot actually."

A huge smile broke over Sam's face. "Thanks Danny. I'll take that as a compliment."

Danny said, "If you don't mind, I think I'd like to go home early. I'll go get my bag."

They stood aside to let him pass. He hesitated in the hall and said, "Does my dad know?"

Sam said, "Not yet."

"Mom, you got to tell him. He shouldn't hear this from me or some other way."

Sam dropped her head. "I know, Danny, I know. I've been trying to find a way to tell him. I'll come in when I drive you back."

Daniel shook his head, "WE'LL come in." Sam started to say something but he raised a hand and forestalled her. "I'm through with hiding behind you Sam. Remember that the man was once my best friend. He needs to clear the air with me too."

The discussion with Jack wasn't as bad as it might have been but still ranked up there in each of their top ten lists of the worst experiences of their lives. When all the horrific situations they had been in with SG-1 that it had edged out were considered, that left it firmly in the kick in the gut category.

When they came back home, Sam begged Daniel, "Just hold me in your arms. Don't talk. Don't do anything else. Just hold me." And he did for a very long time.

The next day, when they talked about the trip to Tahoe, Sam told Daniel, "I think going ahead with this now is the right thing to do but I won't feel right about it until we have it blessed by the church." This was a foreign language to Daniel and not one of the 20 plus he had mastered. Sam had been getting up and going to Mass without him almost every Sunday. She had told Daniel that the resumption of her childhood Catholicism was another contributing factor to the split with Jack. Jack didn't care if she went to church but had completely undermined her efforts with Danny, telling him he didn't have to go when she insisted that Danny come with her. Daniel felt some sympathy with Jack. Daniel wasn't a believer and he suspected that there would have been some conflict over this had he been in Jack's shoes. However, he felt that the past 16 years had earned her parental rights with Danny that he didn't have and he had stayed out of the argument that happened every Sunday morning when Danny was visiting his mother. Now he also agreed to her desire to have a religious ceremony later, not seeing the harm in it if it made her happy. 


	5. Chapter 5

Sam was a little annoyed with Daniel for not picking her up at the airport. She was even more annoyed when she pulled up the driveway and saw a dark house, devoid of even a porch light. She'd been gone for three whole days finishing up a consulting job and she and Daniel were about to get married. Shouldn't he be dying to see her?

Sam slammed the trunk door harder than really necessary and lugged her computer bag and carry on up through the door between the garage and the kitchen. She tripped over something right inside the door and swore, making no effort to be quiet or ladylike about it. She flipped on the light and viciously kicked the wastebasket, revealed directly in her path. Sam was mad at Daniel but when the wastebasket flew across the room and trash fell out, she was mad at herself too. She was really acting like an idiot. She had pulled a lot of late nights herself at Cheyenne Mountain. She certainly should be able to understand how it could happen. 

She picked up the trash and restored the wastebasket to its appointed spot. Then it occurred to her to wonder how it had found its way in front of the door to the garage. When she talked to Daniel the night before, he told her that when he came home he had found most of the plants in one of the landscaped beds in front of the house dug up and lying on their sides. It could have been a dog but he doubted it. Had someone been in the house? Daniel's car wasn't in the garage and, now that she thought about it, there had been a strange car parked at the curb. It occurred to her that if she suddenly got quiet and started creeping about stealthily, and someone was indeed in the house, they would know she knew they were there. She forced herself to move around normally, opening the refrigerator to get a soft drink while she thought about a game plan.

The refrigerator not only had the normal supply of Guinness and diet coke but there were two magnums of champagne. Was Daniel planning some sort of a celebration? Even knowing she might have an intruder, she couldn't keep but smiling. She left the champagne in place, took out a diet coke and twisted off the top. Humming to herself and the unseen intruder, she retrieved her pistol from on top of the cupboards. Carrying the coke slightly in front of her and the gun straight armed down at her side, she began going through the downstairs. She found absolutely nothing. She went to the cellar door and locked it. Now, at least if someone was down there, she'd hear them when they tried to come up.

Okay, upstairs then. Sam turned on the light at the bottom of the stairs and climbed the stairs at a normal pace but with every sense on alert. She didn't hear anything but she did smell something she couldn't identify. At the top of the stairs, she saw a trail of petals leading down the hall to Daniel's study. There was a soft light seeping out under the door. Surely she would have seen it from outside when she came home. Someone was definitely here because whatever the light source was, it had been turned on AFTER she came in the house.

Sam set the coke down. She took her cell phone off her belt and armed the "panic button" new phones came with now. She held the phone with her finger over the panic button. If it was more than she could handle, she would be able to alert someone. With her cell phone in one hand and her gun in the other, she backed up and kicked open the study door. There was a sort of yelp and a man staggered out from behind the door clutching his forehead. His hand was over his face and it took a moment for Sam to realize that it was Daniel. He was wearing a beautiful, soft blue sweater that she had never seen before, contributing to the slow identification. Daniel dropped his hand and took in the gun that was still pointing at him right between the eyes.

Daniel collected himself and said in a stagy, affected voice, "Please ma'am, don't hurt me. I'll cooperate. Whatever you want." His expression slide into an exaggerated leer, "WHATEVER you want."

"Daniel, what is all this?" She gestured with the weapon.

"Honey, how about you put the gun down and use your hand for any sweeping gestures you might have in mind," Daniel suggested, speaking normally. Sam looked at her hand and hastily, but carefully, complied. She set the cell phone next to the gun. "So maybe surprises are not really a good idea for you?" Daniel asked looked over at the hole kicked part way through the door.

Then Sam began to take in the rest of the room. There were candles flickering on every available surface, the source of the soft light she had seen. There were 4, no 5, bouquets of white roses and the trail of rose petals led to the big overstuffed armchair.

"I'm still evaluating," she replied and went to him. She looked at his forehead where there was definitely going to be a major bruise. "I am so, so sorry," she said contritely. "I thought you were a burglar."

"With a trail of rose petals?" he asked dubiously.

"I didn't see your car. And aren't you allergic to roses?"

"The roses are silk and I'll explain about the car but later." Sam had put her arms around his neck and started kissing everything she could reach and whispering, "Sorry, sorry," over and over again.

Daniel said with an attempt at sternness that failed miserably, "You're going to have to stop that for a moment, Sam. It makes it hard for me to speak coherently."

"We make way too much of verbal communication," Sam said and tried to begin to demonstrate her thesis but he trapped her hand.

"I have a very important question to ask you," he said. He backed away from her and indicated the chair. "Please sit down."

She sat and he knelt before her, took her hand, and said, very seriously, "Will you marry me?"

"Of course but didn't we already have this conversation?" Sam answered.

"I announced it without asking you properly first but I want you to have a proper proposal."

"Yes, yes, yes," she happily accepted. "Now come here."

Instead he reached in his pocket and pulled out a ring and slipped it on her finger. In the buttery light from the candles, she saw a beautiful sapphire in an old fashioned setting. "Oh Daniel, it's beautiful," she breathed.

Sam had seen the near end of the world. Multiple times. It was unexpected that anything on a smaller scale could still surprise her but the phone call she received the next evening was the second major surprise in 24 hours. As she hung up the phone, she said to herself, "Never say never." 

She went back to the bed where her suitcase was open. Clothes were spread out around it, roughly four times as many things as she could take or needed to for their wedding trip to Lake Tahoe the next day. She kept changing her mind. She didn't want to look like an older woman dressing below her years for her young groom. She didn't want to look frumpy either. She wanted to look sexy for Daniel but she wanted the right dignity for the occasion. With her hands on hips, she surveyed her choices so far. It just wasn't going well.

She heard the door downstairs open, offering a reprieve. She rushed part way down the stairs to meet Daniel coming up. His face lit up when he saw her but his body language was not that of a happy man. Her face fell and she asked concerned, "Did something go wrong?"

"I hope not but I just got some rather distasteful information about what might have happened to me when I was missing." He put his arm around her and they walked the rest of the way up the stairs together. He steered her into his office, sat down in the big overstuffed armchair, and pulled her down into his lap.

He sighed and gave her the full dump. "They've found out that the planet where I went missing is a sort of harvesting point for a nasty little operation in that sector. The people running it have relatively high technology. Space travel for sure and they've learned to exploit some Ancient technology, probably the suspended animation technique used on me. The people on the planet with the gate are a low tech, superstitious lot and our information mostly comes from them so there was a lot of reading between the lines for the analysts. The local people don't know why people are taken. There may be a clue in the local legend of a man who appeared again and again over a hundred years. He always looked the same. He'd show up, do some dirty work for the bad guys, something that was out of character completely for him, and vanish."

"Sort of like zombies, right?" Sam said. She looked at Daniel tenderly. She knew what would be bothering him. "You're really worried that you may have been used to do something awful that you can't remember, aren't you?"

He returned her gaze, grateful for her quick understanding. Sam said, "Hey, I have some news that may make you feel a little better."

She waited expectantly. "You don't seriously want me to guess do you? Sam, honey, I'm just not up for that now. How about if I ask nicely?" He pulled her head down and kissed her. "Is that nice enough?"

"I think I need a little more persuasion," Sam said tracing his lips with her index finger.

Daniel had always been an overachiever and the persuasion was quite thorough. At long last, when she could get her breath again, Sam said, "Jack just called."

"Jack as in your ex-husband who just told us a few days ago that we were the scum of the earth?" Daniel asked, not welcoming the news.

"Actually he used much worse words," Sam said, "but you have to give him credit. He apologized, well as close to an apology as Jack gets. He asked to stop by and talk to us this evening."

Daniel said warily, "You don't think he's just lulling us into a false sense of security so he can come over here and finish the job from last weekend?"

Sam shook her head and smiled crookedly. "I know you don't mean that. We both know Jack would never really hurt us. If you want my opinion, he still loves both of us and that's why he was so mad the last time we saw him. In the old days, it was all of us and Teal'c together. Now he feels frozen out."

Daniel snorted, "He's mad because the sexiest woman in the universe walked out on him. When I think of anyone else touching you, I want to tear them apart with my bare hands. A couple of times a stray image has crossed my mind of you and Jack together and I CANNOT handle it."

Sam said, sadly, "I wish that was it. Actually, our main point of contact for the last few years was our shared parenting of Danny. He decided unilaterally that I couldn't possibly be interested in him physically and shut down that part of our life awhile ago. I think what had him so over the top last weekend was that he saw the critical mass in the competition for Danny shifting to us as a team, Danny's mother and his biological father."

A few minutes later, they heard the doorbell ring. Sam got the door as fast as she could, thinking it was Jack. Instead she opened the door to find a flaming mass of something in a brown paper sack that smelled like an outhouse. A moment later, Daniel joined her to stare at the hostile gesture smoking and stinking on their front sidewalk. Sam asked, "How do you even put something like that out?"

Daniel said, "Let's start with water," and ran to the hose at the corner of the house. He put the fire out and then kept dosing it for another minute or two. 

They noticed a car pulling into the driveway but continued to concentrate on the task at hand. Jack strolled down the sidewalk and stood next to Daniel. "Holy shit," he said.

"We know," Daniel responded.

Jack pitched in to help Daniel shovel the mess up and put it in a metal pail and clean up the sidewalk. It was a good fifteen minutes later before they all filed into the house and each of the men went to a different bathroom to clean up. When they reconvened in the living room, Sam had drinks ready for them and some chips. "I got to ask," Jack said, "you kids refuse to buy cookies from the local Brownie Troop or something? Or maybe looking at your forehead, Daniel, you got in trouble with full grown Girl Scouts."

Daniel looked over at Sam. Both of them were amazed that Jack seemed, well almost friendly, and both reached the same decision which was to act like there was nothing surprising about it. Daniel said wryly, "We took care of the anti-Gay factor so we know that's not it."

Jack wanted an explanation. He cracked up when he heard the whole story. "I love it," he said. "Daniel is gay because he's in shape and has a nice wardrobe. Well I'm sure glad I never had any clothes sense. And I noticed you didn't explain the bruise. I bet THAT's an interesting story." He sobered and asked, "So you have no idea really?"

Sam said, "None and this is about the fourth incident in the last week, right Daniel?"

Daniel nodded. "Just last night, I had to park the loaner the garage gave me out at the curb because someone had strewn our garbage all over the driveway. You know one reason we were so glad to get out of the old neighborhood was there had been repeated incidents of stuff like this the last couple of weeks we lived there."

Sam said regretfully. "It was great here at first. This just started this week."

Daniel suddenly looked struck by a thought. "That's it! That's it!" He got up, cocked his hand at an imaginary embodiment of an idea and turned to face them both. Sam thought to herself, "My lord, is he ever sexy when he's in the throes of an idea," and suppressed the thought as this being neither the time nor the place.

"I've been watching the paper for the listing of real estate transfers." He looked at Jack and grimaced. "I was really worried that this house being jointly purchased by the two of us was going to show up before we ever talked to you about, well about, how things were. I guess after we talked to you, I was just in the habit of looking. It was in last Sunday's paper."

Jack said, "And?" He gestured for Daniel to continue, "Don't make me wait for the 'in this week's episode.'"

Daniel in the grip of an idea sometimes had no idea who he was talking to or what was going on around him. He had totally forgotten that this was not precisely his old friend Jack in front of him. He sat down next to Jack on the sofa, reached over and touched his arm, and said, "Don't you see? If someone was harassing us at the other house but didn't actually have us under surveillance, they might not have had any idea where we went when we moved." He spread his hands, "but the paper told them where to find us."

Jack looked at Daniel and an improbable smile appeared on his face. "You didn't think for one minute I did this?"

Sam and Daniel were completely shocked. Daniel answered for both of them, "Jack, you're a grown up. People who do stuff like this are immature adolescents inside, no matter what their age."

"Well, it looks like we have something to work with then if you still think I'm a grown up," Jack said leaning back, suddenly looking very tired.

They all sat in silence for awhile. Jack's eyes were closed and Sam found herself wondering if he had fallen asleep. As a result, he startled her when he said suddenly, "This is all so bad for Danny. He's being put in the middle and forced to feel like he has to choose. I think he feels like he's playing by at least two, if not three, sets of rules."

He sat up then and made eye contact with both of them. "I haven't slept much lately worrying about it. We need to show Danny a united front. And," he smiled ruefully, "he's one smart kid. It can't be just on the surface. We have to, at least, start to resolve our issues."

"I'm all for that," Daniel said slowly. "What are you suggesting? Counseling?"

"I'm a do it yourself guy, Daniel." Jack replied. "How about we give it a shot ourselves? I'll start." He took a long swallow of his beer and then said, "I was a real ass, okay, about you getting to know Danny, Daniel. He will always need Sam and me, we're his parents, but he needs to know the kind of man you are, Daniel, too. And, if you look at it right, you're sort of system redundancy. Anything happens to me, he's still got a father."

"Jack, for crying out loud," Daniel tried to interrupt.

"Just let me run because I'm not used to driving this train," Jack warned him. "Also, my reaction to the news you're getting married wasn't my finest hour. You're not a slut Sam. You showed incredible restraint, Daniel, for not trying to take me out for even using that word around her."

He picked up a decorative cushion on the couch next to him, threw it at Sam, and said, "Okay, your turn."

She immediately said, "Danny said that when we fought I used Daniel as a weapon against you."

Jack made a face, "He didn't. Please tell me he didn't."

"He did. He was sort of right, Jack. I did have a bad habit of using Daniel as an example of how I wanted you to act in certain areas."

Daniel looked appalled. Sam quickly added, "Oh it wasn't really you, Daniel. I've been living with you now for a few weeks and, although I love you profoundly, you are just as capable of being a pain in the ass as anyone. It was this idealized Daniel that I created from your memory and used to flog Jack with the last couple of years of our marriage. It wasn't fair, Jack, and I think it showed something fine in you that you didn't go for his throat the minute you saw him."

She fell silent. Daniel knew it was his turn and searched for the right words. "I shouldn't have just shown up like that. I should have contacted you first and worked out how you thought this should be handled with YOUR son. I feel like I should also apologize for how fast it has gone with Sam and me but I know that I would do exactly the same thing again. I couldn't handle being in the same room with either of you if you had taken her away from me and don't blame you for being so angry."

Jack blew air out and said, slowly, "But that's just it, Daniel. I can handle being in the same room with both of you." He hesitated for a moment and then said, very briskly, "Is everyone a happy camper now because I don't want to talk about this any more. Can we move on to the next item on the agenda?"

Daniel said, "Which is?"

"I think Danny ought to be there when you guys have them play "The Wind Beneath My Wings." 

Sam was both touched and indignant. "If you mean when we get married, Jack, I'd love to have him there but we are NOT going to have anybody play "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

Daniel looked puzzled, "What's wrong with that song? I kind of like it."

Jack chuckled and said, "Believe me, you don't want to get her started on how much she dislikes it. For awhile there, it seemed to be played at every wedding and I had to listen to a little speech at some point, usually in the car on the way home from every wedding we went to about it."

Daniel said, "Sure. I don't feel strongly about it." What he did feel rather strongly at the moment was the realization that Jack and Sam had shared 16 years of marriage and he would be playing catch up for a long time to that fund of shared memories and understanding. "But as to Danny, he really didn't want to come."

"Daniel, my approach to parenting doesn't include letting your kids make really stupid decisions as long as they are still kids. He's coming but he's coming kicking and screaming so I'm going to have to bring him."

"Jack, I can't do that to you," Sam said, even more moved.

"What you really don't want to come right out and say is that it is really creepy and strange for me to want to be there and you are totally weirded out." Jack held up his hand to forestall any further comment. "I'm coming and I'm bringing Danny. We're done talking about it." He stood up. "I think traveling up there together would definitely be too much. Tell me the name of the place where it's happening and when and we'll be there."

They were indeed. In fact, Jack and Danny were waiting at the wedding chapel when Sam and Daniel drove up. Danny, nicely dressed in a sport coat and dress slacks and a tie, was no longer kicking and screaming. He was very quiet and subdued and kept shooting Jack, in a full dress uniform, sidelong looks as if he thought he was inhabited by an alien. He actually seemed more upset with Jack than with his mother or Daniel.

Sam was too happy to let anything or anyone dim her mood. She handed her bouquet of lilies and blue hydrangeas to Daniel, who held it arm's length, as far away from his nose as possible, and enfolded her son in a big hug. She looked up into his face and said, "Thank you so much for being here Danny. It makes this perfect." She started to give Jack a quick hug, but hesitated, not sure of herself. 

Jack laughed. "This is already sooo unusual. Let's have a hug." When he released her and she reclaimed her bouquet, he added, "There is one thing I WILL not do. You'll have to get down the aisle by yourself."

They went inside the chapel and got organized for the ceremony. While Sam and Daniel were talking to the minister, and Jack was wandering around looking things over, the organist pulled Danny aside and whispered to him, "I know this is really none of my business but I can't stand it. How is it that you look exactly like the groom but you're calling the soldier Dad?"

For the first time, Danny saw some humor in the bizarre soap opera that was his life. "The groom is my biological father. No one, including my biological father, knows who my biological mother is for sure. The soldier and the bride were married and they adopted me. My adopted parents' divorce was final about two months ago. Now my adopted mother is marrying my biological father."

"Do you all live together in a commune or something," the organist asked, too far gone down the path of completely inappropriate prying to stop now.

"No," Danny said, "not yet but I have a feeling that may be next." He went to sit down and thought to himself, "I'm going to spend the rest of my life giving other people a life story that they will feel compelled to repeat to the next four or five people they talk to." Maybe he was just numb but it actually struck him funny.

Daniel and Sam had decided to defer their honeymoon until later when there was time to properly plan it. They were so happy that it didn't seem like it should matter where they were anyway. They were quite wrong. They came home to find the front door had an obscenity painted on it as did the garage doors. The windows had been soaped and there was tp in the trees. The lovely private setting of the house was decidedly showing its ugly underbelly. Sam looked at Daniel and said, "In the words of Scarlet O'Hara, 'tomorrow is another day.' I'm not ruining today by cleaning it up now."

Daniel snuck back outside later when she was in the shower and got most of the tp out of the trees but clean up was delayed because they needed daylight. Daniel was at Cheyenne Mountain during daylight hours and even though Sam was around the house more, he made her promise she wouldn't work on it without him. The first weekend was one nonstop torrent of rain and it had to wait another week.

The police came and went without offering anything at all helpful. Merilee visited them to try to pry out information and to drop broad hints that they were failing in their responsibilities as homeowners in not immediately cleaning up. She did not, however, offer to help with the effort.

When Jack drove up to drop Danny off for the weekend on Friday, Danny said, "Look at that Dad," and pointed at the front door. I just learned that word a couple of weeks ago and, you are alllllllways telling me about my potty mouth."

Jack got out of the car with Danny and walked up to survey the damage more closely. He noticed the soap on the windows then. Sam came out to greet Danny and found Jack in the bushes looking more closely at a window. "The time has come to put a stop to this crap, Sam," he said. 

Daniel came out of the house then and said, a shade defensively, "Just how do you think you can do that?"

Jack knew immediately where Daniel was coming from. He came back to the sidewalk and said, "Let's just say I have some additional resources as an ex-black ops guy most people don't have. I'll explain my idea to you later and you can decide if you want to go with it." He dusted off his jeans and said, "First of all, let Danny and I help you with the clean up."

Sam protested, "Really, Jack, that would be presuming way too much on you."

Jack cocked his head and just looked at her for a moment. "Come on, Sam, I showed up at your wedding. We've already crossed the ex-husband weirdness barrier."

Daniel took the olive branch Jack was offering, his admiration for the bigness of spirit the man was capable of growing even larger. "Thanks, Jack." He shook his head slightly at Sam who looked about to demur further. "This is going to be a big and unpleasant job."

Jack responded. "No problem. So how about we go to Home Depot and get what we need tonight and then tomorrow I'll come back and we can get started."

A half an hour later, Kathy Jaworski and her family were pulling into the Home Depot parking lot. As they passed in front of the store, Kathy spotted Sam, Jack, Daniel, and Danny entering the store. She said, with unexplained urgency to her husband, Mike, "Let's go to Lowe's instead." 

"Mom, we're already here," her son, Kyle whined from the back seat. 

Kathy turned and looked at Kyle with steel in her eyes. "I said we're going to Lowe's, right, Mike?"

Inside Home Depot, a bored young clerk just happened to look over at the front of the store as he was stocking a display with roach motels. It was them, the interesting people from several weeks before. He left the roach motels in a heap and moved purposefully in the direction of the paint section where he had seen them disappear. His faith in interesting things to come was justified very quickly.

"So are you thinking repaint the whole door rather than try to touch up?" Jack was asking Daniel when a woman's voice said, "Jack O'Neill, I'll be damned."

They all turned to see two attractive women, somewhere in their late fifties or early sixties. One woman continued to talk while the other was clinging to her cart as if she thought she was going to faint. "I told Sara wouldn't it be a riot if we ran into you and she just quoted probabilities to me."

Sara smiled weakly at everyone while the monologue continued. "Jackie, you remember your former niece, Jack, lives here now. She's moving and I dragged Sara along to help. We've got her all settled in and were just picking up a few more things for her." She looked at them all with avid curiosity and wound down with, "So how the hell are you?"

"Just fine, Louise, just fine." 

Louise was looking at Jack expectantly. Danny just knew this was going to be more soap opera. His dad's "former" niece named Jackie yet. How do you manage that?

Jack cleared his throat. "Louise, Sara, this is my son, Danny, my ex-wife Samantha, and Sam's husband, Daniel Jackson." Sara and Louise both looked quite confused. "Everybody, this is Louise Conway, my former sister-in-law, and Sara, my ex-wife."

Danny had that deer in the headlights look. Sara saw his distress and thought she was helping to clarify things by saying, "I'm Charlie's mother." But Danny looked more lost than ever.

Daniel jumped in. "Sam and I met you years ago. That incident with the… the boy… that looked a lot like Charlie. We were in the, uh, program with Jack."

"Oh, of course. I remember. You were also on that expedition with Jack right after Charlie died, right?" Jack was looking stony faced now.

Sara was thinking aloud and too rattled to be as careful as she should have been. "Your wife was missing, wasn't she?" She realized suddenly that probably this was not a good choice of topics but it was too late.

Daniel said flatly, "She died, a couple years later."

Danny suddenly came to life. "Just a minute here. Dad, you were married before Mom and had a kid named Charlie? And Daniel, you were married before? Why didn't I know any of this?"

Louise suddenly said, "Well, this has been lovely but maybe this would be a good time for us to leave."

Sara surprised everyone, including her take-charge sister by saying, "Actually Louise, we haven't eaten and if Jack and his, his group, haven't either, maybe we could go somewhere, catch up on what's happened in the last couple of decades." The invitation was advanced very tentatively and Sara looked afraid of her own words.

The smile that spread over Jack's face was a sight to behold. Daniel looked at Jack and then at Sara and said, "You know what, Jack, we have all this stuff to haul. Why don't we take Danny and get it back to the house and you can go ahead and join Sara for dinner?"

Louise, bless her heart, was quick on the uptake. She chimed in immediately, "You know, that's a great idea. I could run our stuff home to Jackie and Carlos and you can go ahead and go with Jack, Sara. You wouldn't mind bringing her home, would you Jack?"

There were various protestations and discussions but in the end, Daniel and Sam left, almost bodily dragging Danny who started asking heated questions as soon as they were out of the aisle. Louise got two aisles away and whipped her cell phone out to share the amazing developments with Jackie. The young clerk said, "Yes," and decided he really was going to be able to get a novel out of his experiences at Home Depot. And Sara and Jack strolled quietly out of the store and into the evening. 


	6. Chapter 6

Daniel, Sam, and Danny were just backing out of their parking space when Jack and Sara emerged from Home Depot. Danny craned to see exactly what was going on as Daniel drove past them. Sam waved but neither Jack nor Sara even seemed to notice their car. Danny swiveled around to watch out the rear window until they were out of sight. He turned back toward the front and said, "I'd love to be invisible and tag along and watch what happens."

"Being invisible isn't everything it's cracked up to be," Daniel said in a very grim tone of voice. "Watching people you love suffer and not being able to do anything really sucks." Sam put her hand over Daniel's on the steering wheel for a moment. Danny couldn't believe it. They got weirder by the day. They were both acting as if Daniel had actually been invisible. 

"Are we really going home?" Danny asked, "Because I'm running on empty here."

"How about we order some pizza?" Daniel suggested. "I'm kind of in a mood to crash and we'll be up early in the morning working on the house."

Danny groaned. "Can't we PAY someone to do stuff like that?"

They ignored him. As much to stir them up as to satisfy his curiosity, Danny said, "I bet your first wife was Sha're, right?"

Daniel glanced up at the rearview mirror and made eye contact with Danny who was learning forward between the seats. "How did you come up with that?"

"That first night, you asked Dad about a picture of Sha're and you were really upset that he got rid of it."

Daniel said, "I don't want to talk about her while I'm driving down the highway. How about we wait until we get home."

"Ooookay. Then tell me about Charlie, Mom." 

Sam shifted uneasily in her seat. "I think that would be better coming from your dad."

"You really think MY dad wants to talk about something like that with me? General Touchy Feely NOT himself?" Danny retorted.

So Sam told him how Charlie had accidentally killed himself with Jack's gun. Danny sat very still afterwards. A lot of things made sense for the first time. He marveled at the amount of self-control his father had exercised to keep himself from overprotecting Danny. His dad must have been obsessed with preventing history from repeating itself but he had almost always managed to hold back and let Danny be one of the guys. He remembered a couple of arguments between his parents when his mom had been telling his father to ease up, that he had to let Danny get his share of hard knocks.

"So why did Sara and Dad get divorced," he asked as Sam unlocked the front door and they went into the house.

"I don't know for sure but I do know that the death of a child frequently has that effect on a couple," Sam answered.

Danny plopped down in an armchair in the living room. "So it's not like you stop loving each other but stuff about the kid gets in the way?" Danny asked thoughtfully. "I mean maybe he still loves her, at least a little?"

Sam and Daniel exchanged a look over his head. "How would you feel about that?" Sam asked carefully. "I mean if they did still love each other and they got together."

"Look, I'm sure you both know I would like my mom and my dad back together, to have things the way they used to be. But now that you guys are married, thank you very much Daniel, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it would be nice for Dad to have someone too." Daniel nodded and started to walk out of the room. "Wait a minute. You were going to tell me about Sha're," Danny called after him.

Daniel turned around. His posture just looked defeated. He looked at Danny wearily. "Why?"

"Why?" Danny was amazed. "I'm interested. I bet it's really a good story."

"If you want a story, turn on the TV. It's Friday night. There ought to be something on the Sci-Fi channel. Sha're wasn't 'a good story.'" Daniel's words didn't really go with the flat, unemotional way they were delivered. Sam had seen this before. Daniel was crawling inside of himself. Daniel turned around and left the room without interruption this time.

"What's his deal?" Danny asked contemptuously.

"I'd send you to sensitivity training if I thought it'd help," his mother said. "I'll tell you about Sha're but you are not to bring her up to Daniel again unless you want to talk about it because you care about what she meant to him, you care about his pain." She sat down opposite him and looked him in the eyes, "Are we clear on that?"

When Sam came to bed about an hour later the room was dark and Daniel was already under the covers. She spooned around him and he reached back and patted her bottom. They lay quietly for awhile, reveling in each other's warmth, in the comfort of it. Sam loved the fact that every time she touched Daniel, he didn't assume she wanted sex. He seemed to understand that women need a lot of physical closeness for its own sake.

Sam snuggled closer and said, "I'm sorry you are so sad. I know with my dad, I can go a long time and talk about him quite unemotionally. I mean he's been dead for years. But then suddenly something will make it hurt again for a little while, almost like it did at first."

Daniel said, his voice tight, "It's not just Sha're, Sam. When I allow myself to really feel her loss, it brings back Skaara and all the people of Abydos too. The loss is huge and Jack and I were the only ones left to mourn. That's why it was particularly hard when he got rid of her picture. Now it's just me."

He rolled over on his back and looked up into her face as she was leaning over him. He reached up and touched her cheek. "I'm so afraid this is all going to turn out that I did something terrible."

"Daniel, if you were in control, you couldn't and you wouldn't. If you weren't, you can't blame yourself for that." She laughed a little. "I know sex doesn't solve anything but if you would like, I would like, and maybe, for a little bit, we could make everything else go away."

"Then that nightgown is just going to get in the way," he responded and in a moment they were skin to skin and in their own world.

Some time later, after Sam thought he had drifted off to sleep and she was fading herself, he said, "Sammy, I haven't brought this up because I've been afraid of what it might mean about Danny." 

Sam really was not looking forward to what might be coming next but she prompted him encouragingly anyway. "Remember those three kids in the mall? The ones who asked if I was related to Danny?"

"Oh lord, you're thinking what I've been thinking, aren't you?" Sam groaned. "You're thinking that maybe it's those kids who've been vandalizing the house? I guess on one level I was afraid of what Danny might have done that could have fostered that sort of anger so I've just been telling myself that it couldn't be them."

"I think we should talk to Jack and confront Danny together, all three of us. Jack's gone out of his way to make peace. I think we should start dealing with Danny as a unit."

"I agree," she said. He encircled her with his arms and they finally did fall asleep. A few hours later, Daniel woke Sam moaning in his sleep. He was clearly dreaming something that had him extremely distressed. She shook him awake. He looked at her in the dim light coming in the window from the full moon. She noticed that he was shaking. "Oh my God, Sam, what I just dreamed. It can't be what happened to me. It just can't be."

"Can you tell me? Do you want to? I mean, would it help?" Sam ached for him. She wanted to help but she didn't know how.

He gave one long shudder. "I can't tell you Sam. That would be admitting that it might be true to myself. And if it is true, no one can ever know, especially not Danny."

He pulled her to him and said, "Just be close to me. Promise me you'll never leave me no matter what?"

Sam whispered softly, "I promise."

At 8:00 they were out of bed and downstairs drinking coffee. They flipped a coin and Sam shook her head at her bad luck as she went up to wake Danny. He protested vehemently but she had been waking him up for years. Jack still hadn't arrived when Danny made his way downstairs, complaining loudly about this being unconstitutional on a Saturday morning. "Where is Dad anyway?" he asked, clearly put out that if he had to be up this early, his father, the instigator of this whole poorly conceived activity, apparently hadn't dragged himself out from between the sheets yet.

"Right here," said Jack, letting himself in the front door. 

Sam thought, "My, we have gotten really comfortable with the situation at a blinding speed, haven't we?" slightly resentful, for reasons she couldn't identify, at his lack of a knock.

Danny thought about the commune again. But that thought was immediately banished by the sight of the woman who followed Jack in the door. "You all remember Sara from last night?" Jack asked, deadpan. As if a one of them would have forgotten, even ten years from now. "When I told her why we were in Home Depot, she offered to come and help."

"That's terrific. Thanks a lot," Sam said warmly for herself and Daniel. After a certain amount of confused milling around, Daniel realized that he would be a fool to let his pride get in his way. After the dream last night, which still plagued him, he wasn't feeling very proud anyway. Jack appeared to know quite a bit about home improvement type things and Daniel knew very little, unless your home was a tent or a mud hut. He said to Jack, "You are trying not to step on my toes, Jack, but I don't have a clue. Why don't you get us organized."

They hadn't been working for long when Danny's cell phone rang. Both his fathers looked at him like he was nuts. Who, other than a doctor on call, carried their cell phone with them when washing windows. Danny went a little distance from the others to answer it. There was a big smile on his face when he came back. "Dad, Daniel, Mom, my friend Carmen, just called. We had been talking about spending some time together this weekend. I hope it was all right that I invited Carmen over to help." 

How could they object? This project was beginning to resemble a barn raising. Sam said to Daniel, "Next thing you know Merilee and Daryl are going to show up." 

Daniel said, "You obviously went into the wrong line of work. You should have been a prophetess." He indicated the couple coming down the driveway. Merilee and Daryl offered to help and refused to take no for an answer. Merilee was virtually useless, mainly there to pump for information, but Daryl turned out to be a solid guy. Sam found herself wondering how Merilee had trapped the hapless fellow.

When Daniel and Jack both found themselves in the garage, retrieving various supplies, Daniel decided this was the opportunity to fill Jack in on their suspicions with respect to Danny and the vandalism. Jack listened without interrupting until Daniel finished. When Daniel finished, Jack didn't say anything for a while. Then he looked straight at Daniel and said, "I really appreciate being brought in on this. I took the lead on the home improvements. It's your house and your wife that are being affected. You take the lead on dealing with Danny." Daniel felt like he saw some sun breaking through the clouds. This odd relationship they had formed was getting better all the time. Jack said thoughtfully, "If you're right about Duarte, I think I know why he never vandalized our house. That would have made more sense, wouldn't it? I put the fear of God into a couple of kids shortly after I moved in with some old friends helping. Maybe word got around. I'm thinking we could do something like that here."

Before he could explain himself further, they heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway and exited the garage to see a teenaged girl climbing out of old but well-maintained sedan. She had glossy, straight, black hair almost to her waist. Her build was that of a WW II pinup, way too shapely for modern beauty standards that applauded thin, toned women, but very pleasant when a man went with his instincts. "I thought Carmen was a guy," Daniel said.

"You're still learning Danny, aren't you?" Jack snorted.

Danny appeared from around the house and approached her. They saw a curious thing. He didn't put his arm around her or make any kind of flirtatious move. Instead, he stopped a few feet away and seemed almost shy, reminding Daniel of himself as a young man, the first time he had ever had that sensation since meeting his son.

They strolled toward the handsome young couple, standing there in the sunlight. Danny looked up as they approached and said, with something indefinable in his voice, "Hey, I'd like you to meet my friend, Carmen Duarte." She smiled shyly at them. She had a very sweet, slightly round face and big brown eyes. "Carmen, this is my dad, General Jack O'Neill, and my stepfather, Dr. Daniel Jackson." 

Carmen didn't have the kind of face that could hide anything. It was clear that she knew the whole story about their tangled relationships. Daniel said, "It's really nice to meet you."

Jack agreed, "Same here." They all stood rather awkwardly for a moment and then Jack said, "Danny said you offered to help. You could just pitch in with whatever he's working on at the moment."

As soon as they were out of earshot, Jack said, "Didn't you say that kid in the mall was named Duarte?" Daniel nodded. "Did he look anything like her?"

Daniel said, "He was Hispanic, I think, but whether he looked enough like her to be related I couldn't say. But you know, if Danny's dating the guy's sister, maybe we're not being fair to Danny assuming he gotten in some sort of trouble. It could just be that the kid from the Mall is an overprotective brother."

Jack looked dubious and simply said, "You've haven't been around for the stuff Danny's pulled in the last couple of years. But, okay, it doesn't hurt to think positively."

By noon, there was a fresh coat of paint on the front door and the garage doors and all the windows were sparkling. Daryl displayed some backbone by dragging Merilee off at that point to eat lunch at their own house and Sam scrounged around in the kitchen with Sara to find something to feed everyone else. Sam had absolutely no idea how to act with Sara. It made her appreciate even more how odd it must be for Daniel dealing with Jack. 

Sara had a very calm presence. Sam thought how well she must have fit with Jack. He'd be bouncing off the walls, cussing something out, and she'd just be there steady, anchoring him. Sara, in turn, looked at the younger woman, struck by how beautiful she was and remembered what Jack had told her about Sam's career accomplishments. To her, it seemed like sharing the military as they had must have made such a difference. It didn't really make sense to her that they had ended up divorced.

Finally after some inconsequential conversation about what they could do with the meager stores Sam had found, Sara said, "This is really strange. Jack's two ex-wives together in one kitchen."

Sam agreed. Sara continued, "I know it's prying but I have to ask. Why? Why didn't it work out?"

Sam thought about giving a glib surface answer but something in her gut told her that there was more going on, that she and Sara needed to connect, to really be honest with each other. "It's taken me a long time to figure out. I think I always loved Daniel but couldn't see it because I had this fixed notion that I ought to be with someone like my dad, that marriage was the kind of relationship my parents had. My parents loved each other but they weren't really friends on the kind of intellectual plane that Daniel and I were. So I was looking for the wrong things. But then Daniel disappeared and I married Jack and I think I spent our whole marriage trying to deal with his not being Daniel. There were other things that contributed and probably, if it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have given up, but at the core it was Daniel." She looked over at Sara. "That makes me sound horrible, doesn't it?"

Sara crossed the kitchen and put an arm around Sam. "Promise me you won't tell Jack but I feel like I need an ally here and I am going to trust you." Sam promised. "I tried to get over Jack. I married someone else and made us both miserable for 15 years, because he wasn't Jack. We just got divorced a year ago. That's the real reason my sister dragged me here. She was worried that I wasn't bouncing back fast enough and thought I needed distraction. I understand carrying a man deep in your heart your whole life."

Sam looked into her kind face and felt an instant kinship with her. She found herself saying, without really planning it, "If you're hoping that you and Jack can find something after all this time, I'll help you if I can." 

Jack walked into the kitchen to find his two ex-wives hugging each other. They both turned and smiled at him in a way that he couldn't help but find a little unnerving.

Carmen and Danny went off for a while in her car. Danny was officially grounded for his latest escapade but after the two had worked so willingly to help, Jack didn't feel like being strict about enforcing it. When they came back, they both seemed extremely subdued and Carmen looked a bit puffy around the eyes. Sam hoped they hadn't had some sort of fight. She liked Carmen much better than any of Danny's other girl friends she had met in the past.

Carmen was ready to leave immediately and Jack arranged it so that she would drop Sara off at Sara's niece's house on her way home. Jack was going to take Sara to a movie later but Danny's three parents needed to be alone with him to have the talk they were not at all looking forward to. Carmen and Danny seemed to have a hard time parting. She clung to him and he held her tightly. It clearly wasn't about sex. It was about comfort.

They steered Danny to a chair in the living room and all sat looking at him. "What's up? I feel like you guys are going to tell me you voted me off the island or something." He was definitely acting guilty about something despite his cheeky words. 

Daniel said, "I have a story to tell you" and he related the incident at the mall. Danny looked ill as soon as he heard the name Duarte. "Do you think you know this kid?" Daniel asked.

"I might," Danny admitted. "Was he about 5'8", thin, earring in one ear?" 

Sam confirmed, "As best I can remember."

Danny just sat, look down. "I've been trying to figure out whether to tell you about this for a while. I didn't want to. I still don't want to tell you what was going on but I can't handle this alone."

Sam asked, "You KNEW who was vandalizing us all along?"

Danny quickly corrected her. "I'm pretty stupid I guess but I never made that connection. I should have. Her brother is a real loser. He's been arrested a couple of times. He's done some really nasty things to me at school. I think if I hadn't been so careful about not letting him catch me alone, he and his friends might have beaten the crap out of me by now. No, I meant the whole mess with Carmen."

Jack commanded, "Explain mess."

"She's different than the girls I date. I should never have gone anywhere near her. She's sweet, innocent, very naïve and too good for me. Her parents are really strict with her. It took forever to get her to stop being shy with me. Maybe the challenge kept me coming back. And the fact is that all that innocence combined with that figure is pretty attractive you know"  
He stopped talking for a little bit. He was twisting the bottom of his shirt in his hands and his mother remembered her little boy twisting his shirt and working up his courage to confess that he'd broken a window. Somehow she knew this was going to be bigger than a window.

"So finally I got her to agree to go out with me right after you came back Daniel. She didn't want me to come to her house but wanted to meet somewhere. I found out later she snuck out. I took her to this party. I should have known better but it was worse than I thought it was going to be. It was so awkward. The other girls were pretty catty to her because she was different. She made them all look sort of hard and used actually. My friends were teasing me about her. I should have just left but I didn't. I was so involved in my own misery that I wasn't being particularly sensitive. I had some beers. She had a couple. I don't really think she wanted any but she was just trying to fit in. It hit her pretty hard. I don't think she'd ever had a drink before."

Danny looked up at them and there were tears in his eyes. He suddenly looked very young, all the cockiness bled out. Daniel saw something he understood much faster than either Sam or Jack. He moved to sit next to Danny. He said softly, "Tell us the rest."

"So I pulled her into this bedroom and we started making out. She was okay with it at first. I just keep going further and she was drunk and embarrassed and had no idea how to handle someone like me. She didn't fight me and she never said no in so many words but she didn't want it. If I hadn't been drunk, I would have seen that." There were tears running down his face now. "She was … it was her first time. Afterwards, she was crying and crying and it sobered me up real fast. I got her out the back way so she wouldn't have to face any of my so called friends. I tried to tell her I was sorry. I tried to make it better but you can't fix something like that. I've spent all these weeks since then trying to show her I'm sorry. Trying to win back her trust. She was like a bird with a broken wing at first. If her brother had even the sensitivity of a rock, which is about what I think he has, he would have figured out that I had hurt her and probably how."

Sam had let out a small moan and put her hand over her mouth. Jack's fists were clenched. It was Daniel who knew what to say. "You did something very wrong and you know it. The fact that you know it and are so sorry is very important and speaks well of you. We all forgive you. It seems like Carmen has. And it doesn't affect our loving you either. But it is also true that you did something really wrong that has consequences. We can't take the consequences away. We can only help you deal with them." 

Danny looked at him gratefully but then his face clouded up. "There's more." Daniel said, so sad for his son and for the girl.

Danny nodded. "She just told me she's pregnant." 


	7. Chapter 7

Jack and Sam were shocked into silence by Danny's bombshell. Daniel, on the other hand, had seen it coming and nudged Danny into his confession. He took the lead now, asking, "What does Carmen want to do?"

Jack suddenly found his voice. "Wait just a minute. Let's get some ground truths established here. Are you sure it's yours?"

Danny and Daniel turned near identical looks on him, their blue eyes mirroring the same distaste. Danny said sarcastically, "What part of she was a virgin didn't you understand Dad?"

Sam spoke for the first time, asking, "Is she completely sure? Maybe she was confused about her cycle?"

"She went to Planned Parenthood and got a pregnancy test," Danny said, destroying that fragile hope.

Jack picked up on the Planned Parenthood reference immediately. "So she's thinking of a termination?"

This got him another hostile glare from Danny. "She's a devout Catholic. The guilt would kill her."

"Danny, it would better for everyone," Jack pleaded.

"Better for the dead baby? My mother didn't abort me," Danny retorted hotly.

That cast a pall over the entire group. Daniel had vivid images spring to his mind of some poor girl he couldn't even remember left to fend for herself with Danny in her womb. His horrid, lurid dream came back to him and he could taste the bile rising in his throat. Sam thought about Danny as she had first seen him, a very small, innocent, defenseless little creature. Jack wished he had paid more attention to the public debate over this issue. He knew there were people who had put together a set of arguments for his point of view but he didn't know those arguments well enough to present them persuasively.

Finally Jack said, "Danny, it isn't really a baby yet."

Sam, still thinking about her precious baby Danny, said, "Yet if born prematurely, it looks exactly like a baby and grows into a child?"

Daniel held up a hand. "This is not the place for a recapitulation of the ProLife/ProChoice debate. We are not Hannitty and Colmes. We're the parents of a boy who got the girl he loves pregnant and wants to do the right thing if he can determine what that is. And, the girl, who is really the one making the decision, isn't planning on an abortion."

Danny looked at Daniel stunned. "How did you know that I love her? I only just figured it out myself."

Daniel smiled faintly. "Maybe you have more of me in you than you want to admit. Danny, please answer my initial question. What does she want to do?"

"She's really confused. The only things she's sure of are that she won't have an abortion and her parents and brother are going to go completely nonlinear. I think she's more frightened of them than she is of what the pregnancy might bring."

Daniel nodded. "I'm afraid she's probably right about their initial reaction but I would hope that they would get over it. The next question is what do you want to do about it?"

"I don't want to lose my child or my future or hers. I guess I want to have it all," he said sadly, "and I know that isn't possible real world." He turned completely to face Daniel now. "I was hoping maybe if she wants to give the baby up for adoption you and Mom could raise it."

"Oh for crying out loud," Jack exploded. "This isn't 'General Hospital' or some other stupid soap opera. You need to put this behind you." He tacked on belatedly, "and so does she."

Daniel more or less ignored Jack. "Your mother and I would have to discuss any adoption."

Sam made some inarticulate noise but said nothing.

Jack said, slowly, "I guess I don't seem too sensitive to you so far, Danny. The thing is, my primary concern has to be you, my son. You have tremendous potential even though you've not been interested in showing it for a few years. I don't want to see it all blown here and now."

"What about Carmen's potential? What about our baby's potential?" Danny asked. "The way out of this is not something that saves just me."

Jack made a helpless gesture, as if to say, "I know that."

"The first step has to be Carmen's. Until she tells her parents and decides what she wants to do, Danny doesn't even know his options. But," Daniel continued to focus exclusively on Danny as he had through out the whole discussion, "You need to let her know what kinds of things she can expect from you so she can take that into consideration."

Danny nodded, "I kind of did already. I told her I'd marry her or take her wherever she wanted to go or be with her when she told her parents or see if you guys would take the kid. I told her she should not think about any limits from me. I'll do whatever she needs."

Daniel was quite obviously very moved. "I'm so proud of you Danny. Not for how she got pregnant, obviously, but for everything you've done since then." Suddenly Danny and Daniel were hugging. Danny closed his eyes and to Sam and Jack watching him lean against Daniel, it almost seemed like he was drawing strength from him. When they broke apart, Danny looked at Daniel and said, "Thanks Dad for being here."

Nobody seemed to have anything to say after that. They sat awkwardly for a moment and then Danny said to Jack, "Don't you have to go take Sara out?"

Jack said, "I'm not going to do that NOW."

"Why not? Nothing's happening here. I REALLY don't want to talk about this any more. I just have to wait until I hear from Carmen like Daniel said," Danny said reasonably. He got up and went upstairs and they all just sat and watched him go.

"Well," said Jack. "Well." He sat for a moment before saying, "Snappy one-liners seem to be failing me here and I don't want to talk about feelings any more either so I guess I will go."

They heard the door close softly and then Sam got up and went to sit next to Daniel who was still on the couch. "He called me Dad," Daniel said softly. "Did you hear him?"

"You were telling him everything he wanted to hear. You should have heard yourself." Sam said. "You don't think that when we come back and say we're not willing to raise his child he's NOT going to think that was me and not you?" 

She sounded angry and Daniel looked at her surprised. "WHEN we come back? Are you saying you wouldn't be willing to take the baby? Sam, I missed out on Danny's childhood. This would be another chance." He looked at her beseechingly.

"I didn't miss out on Danny's childhood, remember? I'm in my fifties. I would be in my 70's before the child got out of college. Is that a fair thing to do to a child?"

He was looking at her absolutely appalled. It was almost an audition for the role of Caesar when stabbed by Brutus. He shook his head, stood up, and said, "I, I um have some reading to do," he gestured vaguely, "upstairs." He plodded up the stairs, his steps very heavy and left Sam alone and suddenly quite frightened of what was happening to all of them.

For awhile each of the three miserable people sat in their misery alone. After a couple of hours, Danny rapped lightly on the door of Daniel's study. "Are you busy?" Danny asked tentatively.

"Just trying to occupy my mind so it wouldn't think about other things," Daniel said. "Come on in."

"I'm really sorry I've forced you to do that," Danny said looking at his feet.

Daniel tilted his head and looked at Danny, then looked away before speaking, "It's actually not you, Danny. It's your mother."

"You remember her?" Danny's voice rose incredulously.

"Not really but what I keep thinking is what might have happened to her. I get her pregnant and then, apparently, I go into deep freeze and I'm not there. You're standing up for Carmen. Did anyone stand up for her?"

"What do you mean, 'deep freeze?'" Danny asked.

Daniel flushed, realizing he had breeched classified information but suddenly thought Danny had a right to know some of it. "Surely you've noticed that I look awfully young for someone who was 39 when you were born. And I don't remember all those missing years either. The government thinks I was in some form of suspended animation, frozen."

"Nah," Danny said quickly. Then he realized that Daniel wasn't kidding. He might be delusional but he definitely wasn't kidding. "This is like the X-Files. I mean, nobody can really do that can they?"

"We can't. That doesn't mean someone somewhere can't." They sat and looked at each other.

"Why, Dad?" Danny asked. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

Daniel broke into a wide smile. "That's the second time you called me Dad."

Danny bit his lip and looked sheepish. "It was probably about time, huh? I've been a real brat to you and you've been pretty patient about it. I…"

Daniel laughed and cut in, "You're enough Jack's son that it's time to just say fine and let it go. We've both okay with it now. And, back to your original question, we don't know why someone would put me in suspended animation but tests on me seem to confirm that it happened."

"Wow. I bet I can't tell anyone this or they'll have to kill me, right?" Danny asked. Daniel nodded. "Thanks for trusting me. Mom and Dad have never told me anything."

"This isn't a contest, Danny, and I'm not trying to make it one. Maybe we'll come to a place where you just happen to have three parents instead of two."

"Dad," Danny said and they both laughed a little at his use of the name, "Do you have any idea at all what might have happened to my mother?"

"I'm having really bad dreams, missing pieces of my memory I'm guessing, and I think they've been about her. It's different from what I remembered at first. Those memories were clearly implanted somehow but I'm not sure what these new ones mean yet," Daniel replied carefully.

"Sometimes I wish I could just move to an alternate universe where none of this happened. Do you suppose there would be one where I'd be dating Carmen but she wouldn't be pregnant?" Danny asked whimsically.

Daniel's response was in the same vein with his remark about being invisible the night before, way too serious for such a fantastic topic and delivered as if he spoke from experience. "Alternate universes tend to suck. Chances are she'd be in love with someone else. Engaged to him or even married. You might not even be there." Now that he knew about Daniel being frozen, Danny wondered for just a moment if maybe Daniel actually did know something about being invisible or going to an alternate universe. But cryogenics was something people were actually working on. Invisibility and alternate universes – that was Marvel Comics.

Danny realized he needed to focus. "Actually, the reason I came in was I got done talking to Carmen a few minutes ago. I think I about have her persuaded that if when she tells her parents, they won't let her stay here and finish school, we get married, what do they call it, "in name only," so she gets out from under her parent's control and I have some rights." He covered his face with his hands and rubbed hard. "The problem is that they would have to agree to it. The only place in the whole country AND Mexico where you can get married without parental consent before 18 is Mississippi. I looked it up on the internet." 

He looked at Daniel and shrugged. "Let's say, for the sake of discussion, they agree. I thought she could stay here and I could keep living at Dad's. Then after the baby was born and we were out of high school, we could see what the right thing to do about the marriage was. I know I should have talked to you and Mom first but it just sort of happened. Do you think you and Mom could let her live here like that?"

"Why don't we go find your mother and go get something to eat?" Daniel suggested. "We can talk about it."

As they started to go downstairs, Danny's cell phone on his belt started ringing. He snatched it up and noting the caller id answered, "Carmen. Is everything all right?"

He listened intently, more and more distraught as she told him what had happened when she told her family. "I'm coming over there," he said at last. She tried to talk him out of it because of her brother's rage and threats but he said, "I don't care. I'm not afraid of him and I'm not leaving you in that situation."

Danny looked at Daniel, pale as a ghost. "She's in her room. She told her parents and they went crazy. Her father called her a puta, a slut. Her brother hit her before her parents pulled him away. Ramon, the brother, also said he was going to kill me. Her parents are sending her to Mexico to her grandmother. She doesn't want to go. She was born here and she's spent her whole life here. To make things worse, the grandmother's really horrid and lives with an uncle who is another Ramon. I wouldn't be able to help her, be part of this, and I'd not have any rights as far as the decisions go about our kid. Carmen's a straight A student and, put together with her minority status, she should be able to get a great scholarship at a really good school if she just finishes this last year of high school with good grades. Dad, I CANNOT leave her there."

Daniel said, "The thing is Danny we don't have any legal rights here."

They stood looking at each other, mutually at a loss. "Dad, look I have to go. I have to tell them that it wasn't her doing. And, maybe if I offer to marry her, they'd let me."

"You're not going alone, Danny," Daniel said very forcefully.

Danny threw up a hand. "Hey, no problem. I don't want to. Her loco brother could do almost anything."

Daniel clapped him on the shoulder. "Good. Let's get your mother."

"Does she have to go too?" Danny asked, uncomfortable with putting his mother in this situation.

"Having a woman there might defuse things a little, don't you think? Plus I don't think she'd ever forgive us if she wasn't invited and she needs to be okay with the idea of Carmen living here. Either she or Jack is going to have to be willing to give you consent to get married and I'm not holding my breath for Jack to agree. Despite that, we should call Jack, give him a chance to be there." Jack's cell ran through to his voicemail and they couldn't think of a non-heart stopping message to leave so they hung up. 

The scene that followed at the Duarte's joined Sam and Daniel's top 10 list of experiences they never wanted to have again along with the experience of telling Jack about their relationship. Danny and Sam didn't speak Spanish so they were spared much of the verbal abuse but Daniel understood virtually every word. On one level, he had to admire Carlos Duarte's absolute command of colorful invective. With Carlos' genes and Daniel's running in the baby, the child was bound to be good with words. 

Finally after a really ugly half an hour or so, they were able to have something more like a discussion although they still were not allowed to see Carmen. Danny told them, haltingly but forthrightly, that he had been the aggressor and virtually raped Carmen. They didn't get any angrier than they already were at the confession because they patently didn't believe she hadn't been willing. After all, she was still seeing him.

Danny, with Sam and Daniel's help, tried to talk about solutions other than marriage that wouldn't involve Carmen going to Mexico but her parents were adamant. Danny then asked for her father's permission to marry Carmen, explaining that they would not live together but he would take responsibility for providing for her. Carmen had told him that it would be hard on their pride to admit it but money could really make a difference. The family sent all the money it could spare to Mexico to take care of her grandmother and to help other family members.

"We are not a charity," Carmen's father said, clearly insulted.

"Of course not, sir," Danny said. "But I am sure you agree that it is a man's duty to support his wife and children as well as, when he can, help his family and hers." You could see the wheels turning behind Carlos Duarte's eyes. He and his wife worked very hard, both holding down two jobs, and accepted a financial responsibility to a large number of people. The financial problems associated with Carmen's pregnancy undoubtedly exacerbated the moral and religious issues for him. 

There was more talking and more talking. Mrs. Duarte remained silent but became visibly more and more upset. Finally, she got her husband's attention and said something to him quietly. They left the room and when they returned, Carlos gave Danny permission to ask Carmen to marry him.

When Carmen entered the room, she immediately ran to Danny and sheltered herself in his arms. The look her parents exchanged clearly communicated their skepticism that she had not been willing. Danny felt fiercely protective of her, looking at her puffy eyes and the red welt standing out angrily on her cheek where Ramon had slapped her. He tuned out everyone else and locked into Carmen. "Remember what we talked about," he said. "Marry me and live with my family while you finish high school."

Carmen studied him for a long time. "Are you sure, Danny? This is going to mess up your life."

Danny said, "Things will be tough for both of us until after the baby's born but people have lived through much worse. And afterwards we'll be able to go on with our lives, feeling good about the decisions we made."

Carmen said very, very softly, "Then, yes, Danny, I'll marry you."

That was when Ramon came home. In a matter of seconds, he had a knife out and went straight for Danny. Daniel demonstrated that he was more than an archeologist and a linguist. With a series of quick, decisive moves, he disarmed Ramon and had him pinned on the floor under his knee. There was a lot of yelling in Spanish. Daniel looked at Danny and Sam. "Do you want me to call the police?"

Carmen's parents looked shaken. "Por favor, Dr. Jackson, do not call the police. He has 18 years. He is still finishing high school because he got in some trouble a couple of years ago and we sent him home for awhile. This would go his record."

Sam said, greatly troubled, "I can't agree to my son being at risk. Ramon has already vandalized our home repeatedly. Now this."

Danny put his arm around her. "Mom, I can't start my marriage putting my brother-in-law in jail."

Ramon said vehemently from the floor, "You are not fking marrying my sister."

His father began to explain to him in Spanish exactly what was going to happen and why he wasn't going to do anything about it. Ramon cussed without stopping the entire time. When he finished, Carlos Duarte said to Daniel, "Let me have him, please."

Daniel took his knee off the boy's back, hauled him to his feet, and handed him over to his father who immediately backhanded Ramon across the mouth. "I promise you on my word of honor you will have no more trouble from him unless your son mistreats my daughter." Ramon started to say something. Carlos raised his hand as if to slap him again, and Ramon shut up. 

Carlos Duarte escorted Ramon to another room. When he returned, they all sat down to talk logistics. Danny had done his research thoroughly on the Internet. At least one of each of their parents needed to come to apply for the license with Danny and Carmen. The license was only $20, there was no blood test required and no waiting period. The first day that was feasible, given the Duartes' work schedules, was Tuesday. They would have to schedule an appointment with the appropriate judge to actually perform the service and they would make that happen as quickly as possible. Danny didn't want to leave Carmen there but the Duartes absolutely refused to have her stay with either Jack or Sam and Daniel until after the ceremony.

They drove back home in heavy silence. It was only as they were pulling into the driveway that Danny said, "We still haven't discussed what happens to the baby after it's born."

Sam said, tensely, "We need Carmen for that discussion, don't we? It isn't going change anything that happens between now and the wedding ceremony anyway, is it?"

Danny nodded. "I guess that's right. I'll go home in the morning and talk to my dad about everything."

"Do you want," Daniel began.

"I think it's better if I handle this," Danny said. "He is not going to like it at all and you guys have started actually getting along. I don't want this to cause a lot of bad feeling. He needs to see this as my idea and not yours." So that was the way they played it.

The following afternoon, Jack arrived at Sam and Daniel's door very upset. He went straight into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer before he plopped down on the couch. "Sam, are you going to sign to permit Danny to get married? I told him I wouldn't."

Sam said, simply, "I am."

Jack hurled the bottle into their fireplace. "Damn it, Sam! That isn't the answer. Thousands of girls just go somewhere, have the baby, and give it up for adoption. How many times have you heard it said that having to get married like this ruins people's lives."

Sam laid a hand on Daniel's arm to stop him from speaking. "If he was going to drop out of school and support her, I would agree. But we're talking about a marriage in name only. And as to those thousands of girls, our son doesn't feel responsible for what happened to them. He feels responsible for this one."

"And what about his future?" Jack demanded.

"Think about it Jack. This is the first time since shortly after we moved back to Colorado that he's taken responsibility for anything. This could actually be what saves him."

Jack didn't speak for awhile. Then he walked over to the fireplace, and looked in, a little embarrassed. "I made quite a mess, didn't I? I guess I'm the one who ought to clean it up."

Daniel offered, "Let me help."

Things were difficult for Sam and Daniel for awhile. The discussion about the baby had been their first real fight since they got married. When they went to bed, they didn't reach for each other. Each lay on their own side of the bed, their backs to each other, and took a really long time going to sleep. Tuesday night, about a half an hour after they had turned out the lights, Sam sat up, turned on the lamp next to her side of the bed, and shook Daniel. "What," he said, distinctly irritated.

"It's time for this festival of passive aggressivity to come to an end," Sam announced.

"Who's passive aggressive?" Daniel asked. "It sure as hell isn't me."

Sam laid it out. "We had a fight three whole days ago. We're both continuing to withhold affection and avoiding resolving the problem. What would you call it?"

"Sam," Daniel said, with exaggerated patience, "We don't even know if Carmen wants to give the baby up and whether, if she did, she'd want to give it to us. It seems sort of stupid to batter each other when there may not be anything to fight about."

"Okay, you're right. We have to table the resolution but how about the affection withholding part?" She looked at him challengingly and then began to trail her hand up the inside of his thigh.

"Sam, turn off the light," he said softly. She narrowed her eyes and studied him to decide what motivated the request. He slowly undid the tie on the front of her nightgown and slipped his hand inside. "I promise you won't regret it."

Jack spent a lot of time that week with Sara, talking it through, over and over again. He felt horrible but she was a real source of strength. Thursday night, they were sitting on the couch at his place. They had exhausted the topic, once again, and were trying to watch a movie on cable they remembered fondly from more than thirty years before. "I could have sworn this was a much funnier movie," Sara said.

"I certainly remembered that we laughed our asses off," Jack said.

"Can you believe that woman's hair?" Sara said. The offending Mall bangs were so extreme that they almost took her breath away.

"It's a matched set with his hair," Jack said indicating the aggressive mullet sported by her costar. "One thing you have to say for the military. It really didn't encourage the mullet. I NEVER looked like that. I seem to remember that you thought this guy was really sexy though."

"What?" she said indignantly.

"I'm just saying maybe he put you in the mood because that was the night that we didn't even make it all the way home from the movie theater before you jumped me," he said.

"I jumped you?" she said. "You're sure about that? I sort of remember being the jumpee, not the jumper."

"We were walking along the street and you kissed me in a particularly suggestive manner," Jack asserted.

"A kiss is a kiss. You were just looking for an invitation."

"Nah, this was special. I'll show you what I mean." He leaned over, pulled her close, and kissed her. Much later, while the credits were rolling, he said, "See, that actor still gets you in the mood."

Sara was there with Jack when the ceremony was held the following Saturday as were Carlos and Angelina Duarte, and Sam and Daniel. Ramon wasn't there but no one missed him. Carmen was luminous. She wore a cream colored silk dress belonging to her mother, a clever seamstress who had altered it to fit perfectly. Her hair was pulled back in a simple twist and she carried a bouquet of red roses. Danny wore a charcoal grey suit and a red tie. The way that they looked at each other called into question the idea of a marriage "in name only." Sam, Daniel, and Jack found they had qualms about that part of the plan.

They went to a small but excellent Mexican restaurant near the courthouse afterwards. It was almost like a normal post wedding celebration except that, at the end, the groom went home with his father and the bride went to stay with his mother.

A week later, Danny had been over, spending time with Carmen. Exhausted, as is typical of that point in the pregnancy, she went to bed early. Before Danny went back to Jack's, Daniel asked Danny and Sam to join him at the table in the breakfast nook. He sat down across from them and said, "There's something I have to tell both of you. Watching this situation with Carmen has made me realize that I can't live with myself unless I go back to … to where they found me, to where they found Danny, and make sure that there isn't anything I can do to help Danny's mother. I talked to command and they've agreed to let me go, although not alone. In addition to some SG personnel, Teal'c is coming from Chulak and going with me. They've very motivated to know what happened."

Sam said, vehemently, "I'm not loosing you again. If you go, I go too."

"Sam, you're not in the Air Force any more. You're in great shape but they wouldn't think you met the quals for this mission. Besides, Danny needs you right now." He looked at Danny then. "It really isn't good timing but the longer I wait the less the odds are that I can do anything." Sam started to speak and he shook his head. "I know what you're going to say. It's already been years but I have to do it. I keep dreaming about her. I can't sleep. I can't live with myself."

"I guess the fact that you care is part of what I love about you," Sam said slowly, her beautiful blue eyes swimming with tears. She clutched his hand across the table. "You'll be taking my heart with you. Please don't break it." 


	8. Chapter 8

Daniel and SG-50 came through the gate first into a clear, sunny day. It had only been a few months since Daniel had stumbled into this park like valley looking for the gate and home. He had been confused by the size of trees that he didn't remember, yet sure, given the unique stone formation that flanked the gate, that no one had moved it on him since he had last seen it. The dial home device had been operational but he hadn't had any of his equipment or any way to transmit his code back. He could tell that he had been the victim of some sort of alien mugging that had stripped him of everything. Hell, even his underwear was gone and replaced with something unfamiliar, but he remembered nothing about it. Fortunately, SG Command had maintained a watch on this gate address during the 18 years he had been missing, the eighteen years he didn't remember, and, given his lack of physical aging, apparently hadn't really lived. SG Command was willing to let the unknown traveler come ahead and Daniel had been able to return to an Earth that had been fast forwarded when he wasn't looking.

Now he was back on this planet again and almost as clueless as when he had left. SG-50 spread out, securing the area but Daniel sat down on one of the lower stones in the pile to the left of the gate. He leaned back against a massive block resting half on his seat and half on a neighboring stone, hoping for inspiration. The stone was cool against him on what seemed like a spring day. In reality, it could be any time of year with no more than Daniel remembered of the planet. 

As a civilian, he obviously wasn't in command -- that was the role of SG-50's Colonel Harris -- but he was still expected to provide leadership, to point them in the right direction to look for Danny's mother and try to discover what had happened to Daniel himself on this planet. He had been so convinced that all he had to do was get back here and things would start to fall in place but nothing had come to him yet. To complicate matters, his problems at home crept crowding in, particularly his son's pregnant girl friend and Sam's unwillingness to agree that she and Daniel would take the baby and raise it

Daniel closed his eyes and let the dream about his past on this planet play here in daylight when he was awake and could scrutinize it instead of being its captive. The girl in the dream was in her late teens with sadness and panic in her eyes. At times, it seemed like she was Sha're. In the dream, he felt both overwhelming disgust for himself and red-hot desire for her at the same time. They were in some sort of a cell. She ran from him and he caught her and then he did what he did even though she was crying and even though bile rose in his throat and he fought to stop himself the entire time. When it was over, there was laughter. That was the part he got stuck on. Was there any way he could have been so taken over, so far from himself that he could have laughed or was someone watching them and laughing?

His reverie was interrupted when the stargate sprang to life and the figure of a lone Jaffa emerged. Daniel's memory told him it had been a matter of a few months since he had last seen Teal'c but there was a dusting of grey in the Jaffa's hair and he was fit but definitely lighter weight, less substantial somehow. Teal'c's face creased in a wide smile and he walked quickly toward Daniel. Daniel jumped up to meet him and they hugged hard. "They told me that you had not aged DanielJackson but I did not believe it until now," Teal'c said, stepping back and looking his friend up and down.

"I feel like I've aged a hundred years inside, Teal'c," Daniel answered, his smile vanishing.

Teal'c didn't question what Daniel meant. That was one of the things Daniel liked about him. He gave you space and waited until you were ready to share. Instead, Teal'c reported to Colonel Harris and was introduced to the rest of the team. Then he asked, directing the question at both the Colonel and Daniel, "Would you like me to show you where I found Daniel's son?"

The village was a half a day's hike away from the gate. The Colonel kept his men vigilant as they marched through savannah, dotted here and there with stands of trees along slow moving streams. The relatively open terrain made it unlikely that they would be surprised but the intelligence gathered in the follow up investigation after Daniel's return had revealed that the Tauri were not the only high tech off world visitors who came to this sparsely settled continent of farmers and herders. The off-world slavers maintained a steady rate of depredation that took roughly 10 of all adults, one of whom, it was believed had been Daniel. They might appear suddenly from out of the sky and the Colonel was concerned about his options should that happen. He wasn't discounting either unfriendly locals who couldn't be blamed if they were immediately hostile to any off-worlder they came upon.

When they reached the village of about 25 cottages, they discovered that it had one broad street down its middle, paved with stones that might have at one time betoken prosperity. Now they were a dispirited testimony to decline. Many were broken or forced up at an angle, making walking down the street more of an adventure than a stroll. It would appear that the inhabitants had been warned of their approach. No children played in the street and no women were drawing water at the well in the middle of the village.

"In case we would ever want to return, I sketched a map when I found Danny," Teal'c said, "and indicated which house held your son, DanielJackson," drawing the map he described from inside his tunic and pointing to the dwelling in question.

Daniel handed it to the Colonel and he and Teal'c crossed the street to stand in front of its heavy wooden door while the rest of the contingent spread out to keep watch. Teal'c rapped on the door but the silence from within was not broken that Daniel could determine. Teal'c cocked his head, hearing something that Daniel couldn't. "There is someone within, DanielJackson," Teal'c announced. "What do you wish?"

Daniel focused, gathering from the corners of his mind what he remembered of the local Latin-based dialect. He nodded at Teal'c and called out, "We come in peace, seeking only information. We have trade goods. Our mission is of great urgency and we will not leave until we have spoken with you."

Now the amount of scrabbling and whispering inside had reached a volume Daniel could pick up as well but there was still no response. Suddenly the Colonel, about 20 feet away from the two at the door, put a hand to his ear. One of his team was telling him something and, based on the expression on his face, it wasn't good. He ran toward them, "Incoming. We have less than 30 seconds. No time to get out of the village."

Teal'c nodded and ran at the door. It opened just as he reached it and he staggered inside, nothing stopping his forward momentum. Daniel and Harris heard him crash against something as they followed him into the darkened interior. They found themselves in one room, poorly lit by small, high windows. The ceiling was more than 10 feet high and there was a loft. Daniel had just time to notice the existence of the loft, Teal'c yelled "Look out." Daniel instinctively dodged to one side as a heavy iron pot crashed to the ground from the loft, denting the dirt floor where he had been standing. He turned and saw that Teal'c was struggling with three young children who were hanging off his arms and one leg. He had several cuts from the knives he was in the process of wresting from their hands. Harris was waging his own war with a determined but elderly woman who appeared to be extremely strong for her age. Like Teal'c, Harris was handicapped by a desire not to hurt his assailant.

Taking his attention off the loft was a bad idea because suddenly someone landed on his back, knocking him down. The demon continued sitting on his back and punching him and, with the wind knocked out of him, Daniel was having a hard time doing anything about it. Harris said, in his courteous Southern gentleman's accent, "I'm so sorry, Ma'am," and gave the old woman a roundhouse punch, knocking her out cold. He then ripped Daniel's assailant from his back and put her in a choke hold. Teal'c had flung the children off and the two smallest were huddled together crying while the older child stood bravely and protectively in front of them, defiant and scared to death.

"We have a common enemy," Daniel told what he could now tell was a young woman whose long dark hair was tumbled in her eyes as she struggled futilely against Harris. "They are coming down from the sky right now. Help us defend you." He spoke very quietly for they could all hear sounds above them. To underscore his point, strafing fire exploded down the middle of the village street, a calling card to introduce the men who would be arriving shortly and warn the villagers not to pick today to stand on their hind legs.

The girl stopped fighting Harris and he reciprocated by letting up on the choke hold. "Daniel?" she asked, her voice hoarse. "Could it be?"

"I'm Daniel but anything else must wait until we deal with the present threat," he said to her gently but firmly. It seemed impossible that he could have found Danny's mother so easily although it would make sense that if this was where her child had been left years before, she would have a connection to the place as well. It was too dimly lit, too hard to see her face to be sure of anything not that he had more than his dream memory of her face in any case.

Harris pulled a bench away from the low hearth and dragged it under the windows on one side of the door. He and Teal'c hopped on it, peering cautiously out the high windows, their weapons trained on the street. Daniel lifted the other scarred, age-darkened bench and positioned it under the opposing set of windows and took up his own post. Harris was speaking very quietly with the rest of his team on his comlink. Daniel saw him whisper in Teal'c ear and then Harris dropped lightly off the bench and came to Daniel to talk with him quietly about the response he directed to the threat.

Outside, a band of half a dozen slavers came strolling into the village. From their casual air and relaxed posture, they were apparently unconcerned about running into any real problems. Over two centuries of steady raiding had produced a cowed people who were afraid to put up a fight because of the certain reprisals that would follow. Daniel thought if the girl behind him was Danny's mother, she might be responsible for the unusual spirit in this one house. The men were joking and making deprecating remarks about what Daniel thought was probably the word for "cattle," apparently their term for the people in the village in something clearly evolved from a Romance language. Daniel was confidant that he would be able to communicate.

Daniel devoutly hoped that Harris' people had been able to surprise any sentries that had been left watching the slavers' ship. He did not want to see more slavers come up behind his party just as they were about to encircle and surprise the men on the street.

Two of the burly slavers went to the cottage across the street and dragged the inhabitants out. One continued to hold an attractive thirtiesh woman by an arm while the others made her four children and an older man lie down on their stomachs on the street. There was a discussion about her merits as merchandise and she was consigned, because of her age, to a "if we can't do any better" category and parked against a house a short distance away under guard.

Two other men now started across the street toward Daniel and his companions. Harris spoke urgently and quietly into his comlink. The slavers pushed in, without knocking, their attention caught by the young woman and the children directly in front of the door, wide eyed and clinging together. Teal'c, who was pressed against the wall behind the door, pushed the door to start it swinging closed and immediately launched himself on the back of the man nearest him while Daniel jumped the other. Daniel had the bigger challenge as the man had glimpsed Daniel out the corner of his eye coming through the door. He was already wheeling in Daniel's direction, preparing to fight.

As the hand to hand combat in the hut began, shots rang out in the street. Three of the squad under Harris' command had established themselves in concealed positions around the enemy while the two others had gone to secure the ship. The initial shots were warning shots, fired high. One of the SG team yelled the word "Surrender" in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French as supplied by Daniel to Harris earlier. In response the slavers started toward the villagers in the street to use them as shields. SG-50 started to fire to keep them at bay and away from the prostrate villagers. 

Three of the enemy fell immediately, two crumbling as if they had been killed and a third screaming in agony from a mortal wound. The others cowered in place. The word for surrender was repeated again. Suddenly one of the remaining three stood and started shooting wildly, hitting the children and then the man. SG-50 immediately took him and the other two slavers out but it was too late for the man and one of the children. The woman ran forward, heedless of any remaining danger, to fling herself down next to her children, screaming and wailing their names.

Daniel, Teal'c, and Harris erupted from their shelter. Harris went to make sure all the enemy were dealt with and Daniel ran toward the woman and the children while Teal'c restrained the mother. SG-50 remained in place, making sure there was no further threat coming. The mother struck at Teal'c as he pulled her away so that Daniel could assess the children and continued to claw, kick, and bite at him. "We are the ones who fought for you. Be still and let us help your children," Daniel said as he hunkered down with Harris but the woman was too far gone in her rage and grief to listen.

Daniel closed the eyes of the lifeless child and Harris confirmed that the man was also dead. One of the three remaining children, partially under the dead child's body, seemed unhurt. One had been shot in the leg, the other in the arm. Daniel spoke softly to them as the SG-50 team member with medic training began to treat the wounds.

People came pouring out of the cottages, including the children and the old woman, now conscious and moving groggily, they had fought a short time ago. Daniel noticed that the young woman did not emerge with them. Teal'c released the distraught mother, who could now see they were trying to help her children, so that she could come to them. Teal'c and the other SG-50 personnel took up positions with their backs against stone cottage walls and their weapons at ready to protect their contingent if the villagers decided to turn on them. The villagers seemed well aware of the power of the off world weapons and stood staring at the strangers, talking little among themselves.

Sergeant Kennedy appeared with a gun in the back of a slaver whose hands were tied behind him. The captive had an air of authority about him and despite his precarious situation, was looking around with contempt. "He appears to be their leader, sir," Kennedy reported shoving the man forward so that he fell to his knees. An ominous, low sound, more like a collective growl than anything else, swelled from the crowd. Some picked up rocks as if to throw at him but the armed men motioned them back.

An older man, likely the village leader, separated himself from the crowd and motioned to two other men. They went into the cottage where Daniel had found the young woman and manhandled her out to the street. There was a ground swell of cursing from the crowd and people spat in her direction. Daniel leapt to his feet and went swiftly to free her from the two villagers' none too gentle grip. He put her behind him and addressed the headman, "What is your quarrel with this woman? She did not attack you. These men did."

The headman said with a voice dripping with hatred. "She is bad luck. She has come back from the dead and brought death with her. We allowed her mother to keep her in her home as long as she never came out and we never had to look upon her but we should have killed her instead. Look what has come to our village." His voice broke slightly on the last few words and he fell silent to gesture at the dead and wounded children, the sobbing woman, and the fallen man.

"She is ours. Give her to us and let us deal with her. Give us this monster as well for our justice and leave our village," the headman demanded imperiously, as if operating from a position of power, although the slight quaver in his voice told Daniel he was afraid.

Daniel looked at Harris and said in English. "Colonel, do you agree that we cannot leave this blameless woman here for their abuse?" Harris nodded. "And," Daniel continued, "We cannot let them murder him," he indicated the captive, "in cold blood either." Harris assented again. Daniel then said to the headman, "We regret very much your loss. We will take the woman and the slaver with us so that they will cause no more problems for you."

There were mummers of disapproval from the crowd but the headman chose not to argue, sensing that it would be futile. Daniel turned to look at the girl and spoke to her softly, "Do you not agree it would be best for you to come with us?" She nodded mutely. "Then if there is anything you do not want to leave behind, you best get it quickly."

She said, bitterly, "I have nothing left. I will come now."

They withdrew from the village and went to the slaver ship, which one of the SG-50 team was readily able to figure out how to fly adequately enough to get them back to the gate. Daniel spoke with the girl who had been watching him in silent awe the entire time.

"You seem to know me," he said to her. "Can you tell me your name and how we know each other?"

A single tear coursed down her cheek. "Ah, Daniel, they have made you forget everything. I am Debri and we were together in captivity. I was with you when you saved Bella," she saw his puzzlement, "one of the leaders of the slavers, and that was why we were captured. They came looking for her.

"I am so sorry I don't remember you. Believe me, I want to very much. There is one thing I must know. We were lovers? We had a child?"

"We clung together for comfort but we never thought we were in love. I had a young man who died during the years that I was frozen and you talked of Sha're. I did give birth to your child." Her answers were slow and troubled and she watched his face anxiously. "Please, tell me of my baby. Do you know what happened to it?"

Daniel smiled at her then and her face lit up as hope filled her eyes. "He's fine," Daniel said. "His name is Danny and he is with me in my land. You would be very proud of him."

Her voice trembled as she said, "I did not even know the baby was a boy." She took Daniel's hands then and pleaded, "Can I see him?"

"We must talk of that. First," Daniel hesitated for it was a difficult thing to ask, "did, did I force you to.."

"No, Daniel," she denied. "If that is what you think you remember, it's because the evil man who led the slavers programmed you to think that for his own amusement." Her anxiety level increased as she asked, "You're not going to leave me here, are you?"

"The slavers may come back to retaliate and I would not do that to you." She nodded vigorously affirming the likelihood. Daniel continued, "It appears that your people's beliefs or superstitious will not allow them to accept you now and you have nowhere else to go?"

She shook her head sadly. "My mother tried to protect me but it was nothing but heart ache for me to be there with her, my brother, and his children."

"If you come with us," he warned her, "you will never see anything familiar again. Not even the animals, the plants, the sky itself are the same. You won't know the language. The people are different but they will be kind. There are very strict rules about people coming from places like this and I don't know what I can promise about where you will live or who you will be with but you will be free and well treated. You should understand that Danny has a mother and I have a wife. We will make you part of our family if it is permitted but your role will be defined by the relationships that already exist." Daniel hoped that he was not promising something that would be beyond Sam's capacity to provide but he could not leave this innocent young woman adrift in a strange universe. "Do you want to come?"

Tears were rolling freely down her face now. She said in a very small voice. "I am frightened but I do not see any other way."

Daniel then went to talk with their arrogant captive, who lounged at the back of the passenger space. Despite his bonds, he almost managed to carry off the impression that he was still in charge through sheer force of will. Daniel found that he could communicate with him well enough to exchange some basic information.

He summarized it for Harris after they reached the gate. "It's amazing. His attitude is that these people are some sort of lower form of human that are suited for service. The slavers have some technique to implant a happy false image in the slave's heads, rather like what I first believed when I returned to Earth. The slaves, to his mind, have happy simple lives of service with their superior masters handling all the hard problems for them."

Harris snorted. "He really believes that crap?"

Daniel grimaced and nodded. "Oh yeah. He knew me. Evidently, I am a cause celebre. They have very strict rules that allow them to continue to feel morally justified. Rules that hedge in how slaves may be treated. He spoke of a dark time in the past when slaves had been abused and appears to feel that they have progressed into some sort of liberal nirvana in which slaves cannot be used for sexual purposes and may only be disciplined in certain proscribed ways."

Harris asked, "How are you a cause celebre? I don't get it."

Daniel elaborated, "There was some guy in charge locally, Herchan, who went rogue. He was abusing his position and had powerful enough connections that he got away with it for decades. By their rules, I should have been released immediately when it became apparent I was not one of these people under their "protection" but Herchan had it in for me for some reason and apparently, at least messed with my mind. I'm hoping Debri, Danny's mother, can tell me more because I still remember nothing. I was captured in the first place because, assisted by Debri, I had just rescued Herchan's second in command, Bella, by pulling her from her small flyer, after it crashed and just before it caught on fire. Bella felt a strong debt to us for saving her life and tried to protect Debri and me. Bella couldn't get us released so she put me in suspended animation and shuffled the paperwork to make me hard to find. Suspended animation is their inventory control system. They take likely slaves whenever they see them and then stash them in suspended animation until they match with an order," he explained in an aside. "Anyway, rather than aborting the baby, their standard procedure, she protected Debri through her pregnancy. The slavers have no interest in dealing with slave babies and children. Too much effort and it distracts the slaves from their duties. Nobody cared when Bella gave Danny back to the Debri's people. She put Debri in suspended animation and stashed her with me. Recently, the whole scandal finally came to light. Debri and I were both released as part of the clean up. They all feel very moral about the whole thing. Justice was done. The guilty were punished. Blah blah blah."

Harris said, "I take it you expect to take Debri back through the gate?"

Daniel confirmed, "Talking to her, there is no way for her to stay here. She may end up being held in Cheyenne Mountain just until they can relocate her on some other world but I hope they will let me take care of her on Earth." He thought to himself, "And the they to include my wife who is not going to be crazy about this."

"We knew going into the mission that if you found the woman, she might need help and I have permission to bring her back with us. The slaver is a different problem. My plan is to thoroughly disable the ship and leave him here to fend for himself." Harris jerked his head toward two of his men who were working over the control panel as they spoke.

An half an hour later, they exited the ship, leaving the slaver with very loose bonds from which he should be able to extricate himself in a matter of minutes. As Harris dialed Earth, Daniel drew Debri aside. "Look around one last time," he said to her quietly, his arm around her shoulders. "Say good bye."

She laughed. "I have nothing left to say good bye to." She looked at Daniel with a brave smile. "Don't worry about me. I'll be all right."

Daniel hugged her briefly and as he was walking her to the gate, he thought, "Danny's a great kid. This woman is got to be good stuff to have been his mother. She WILL be okay and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that happens. 


	9. Chapter 9

Daniel had missed his wife fiercely. He'd only been gone for three days but it felt like forever. He wanted to bury himself in her arms, drag her off to their room, and stay there for a very long time making her really happy. She was an appreciative woman and when she got happy, he got everything a man could want and then some. He glumly wondered, as he opened the door to the house, what the chances were of any of that happening. "Maybe if I make my move really quickly, before she has time to cross examine me about whether I found Danny's mother and what was going to come next," he thought, briefly optimistic for his chances of some joy in the immediate future before the inevitable meltdown that could have him on the couch for weeks.

His instincts told him that he'd do much better with Sam if he talked to her before he said anything to Danny. She'd want to be part of figuring out what he got told and how much, the timing of it. That was why he was hoping that Danny wasn't around. He hadn't seen Jack's car when he drove up so unless Jack had relented and bought Danny his own car in the last three days, maybe he was going to have at least that much go his way. It was a cruel disappointment when the clatter of feet on the stairs was too heavy for either Sam or Carmen. It was the heavy tromp, tromp of his son in a major hurry.

"Dad," Danny greeted him enthusiastically, bursting into the foyer. He was surprised to immediately get a major hug. Danny acknowledging him as his father and being anything but studiously sullen around him was so new that he was still adjusting. "You're back really fast."

"I was surprised myself. I really thought it would take longer," Daniel said neutrally. He had to derail Danny somehow or the ETA for him on the couch might be even sooner than initially anticipated.

"Dr. Jackson?" Carmen said, entering the foyer. It was her first pregnancy and at 4 months she looked more chubby than pregnant but still so lovely. Daniel had no trouble understanding how his son had fallen for this sweet girl with her Madonna-like face – a historical image of a Madonna, not the opportunistic singer. "It's so good to see you. Dr. Carter and Danny have been so worried. I guess it's a dangerous area around where you were looking for his mother. Guatemala does have its share of troubles."

"Carmen, we've told you to call us Daniel and Sam," he said automatically while thinking, "why did we have to pick Guatemala of all places as the bogus location for my disappearance and Danny's mother? Especially since he went ahead and picked a Latina for the love of his life."

"I know," she said regretfully, "but it makes me uncomfortable. My parents always stressed the need to show respect for adults. You're sure you wouldn't like Donna Sam and Don Daniel?"

That compromise just made him feel like he was in a Zorro movie that had been miscast with Anglos in the lead roles but it was really more important how she felt. She was the outsider here trying to fit into the family. "You call me whatever you like, Carmen," he responded and hugged her.

Danny couldn't stand it any more. "She's okay, right? My mother? I mean you're not back so fast because she's dead?"

Daniel was a little stunned by that question. It hadn't occurred to him that Danny's mind would work quite like that. He hated this. He couldn't even answer that question in front of Carmen or it would prejudice the only scenario he had been able to work out to bring Danny's mother to him. "Danny, we'll talk in a minute. I need you to help me get something out of the car, right now."

"YOU WHAT? I'm asking you if my mother is dead." Danny was amazed by his father's lack of sensitivity. This was the guy who was supposed to be the poster child for sensitivity if you listened to his mother talk.

Carmen bit her lip and put a gentling hand on Danny's arm. "I'm afraid I need to use the bathroom. Excuse me." Daniel watched her go, appreciating her sensitivity, while Danny continued to scowl, cluelessly, at him as they both listened to her walk slowly up stairs.

Daniel looked back at his outraged son and said, "Danny, Carmen can't know anything but the official story. You know far more than you're supposed to but it has to stop there."

Danny looked a bit mollified. "Okay, she's gone. Answer my question," he demanded and then belatedly tacked on, "please," reflecting that Carmen was civilizing him rapidly.

Daniel said, "No, she's not dead. She's absolutely fine."

"Wow. You found her, just like that, and she's fine. I'll have to let Carmen and Mom drag me to Mass more often. I was praying my head off, Dad. Wow. So, where is she? When can I see her?"

"She's not here. I mean, she didn't have a passport or anything. I couldn't just bring her into the country."

"Then we can go there, to Guatemala, right? I know it's not cheap but Dad surely we can afford to go and see her?"

"I'm a little puzzled, Danny. I showed up and you didn't want any part of me. You said you already had a dad. You've got a mother and you guys are tight. Why are you so hot to see your biological mother?"

Danny was a little taken aback. He hadn't thought about why he felt the way he did. "Maybe coming to terms with you and finding out that I didn't have to trade one father for another, that having two dads could actually be cool in some ways." He got impatient then. "Come on, Dad, answer the question."

"Danny, I'll be honest with you. I really don't want to go into it with you before I talk to your mother. I don't think she'd appreciate not being part of this from the beginning," Daniel said, deciding the only way to be fair to Danny without telling him everything was to just lay his cards on the table.

"You're afraid of Mom," Danny said incredulously. "I can't believe it. Dad sure as hell isn't but you're afraid of her." Danny lost some of his respect for Daniel. "She's out running. I'm not leaving until after she gets back AND you talk to her." He turned and walked out of the foyer and rapidly went upstairs.

Daniel slumped into an armchair and considered the situation. He was still really in the mood to jump Sam's bones. Maybe, somewhere in his subconscious, he felt like he had to in order to prove he was still the man and not, as his son thought, afraid of his wife. Okay, so he was hot. Sam would be hot too but the all sweaty from running 5 miles way. In his experience, this never left her anywhere close to being in the mood. "Just give it up, Daniel," he told himself. "It ain't happening for you tonight."

Sam went straight to shower after greeting him. "I'm sure we have a lot to talk about," she explained, "and I don't want to do it mired in my own sweat." Daniel also thought she was pulling a delaying tactic and he was right. They had talked long enough for her to know that he had found Danny's mother. Sam was a brilliant woman and had immediately discerned the can of worms that had been opened.

He sat on the bed, watching her dress. Finally he decided that he wasn't waiting on her timetable any more. He had done a complete about face and wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. "Her name's Debri," he said, "and she was really in a bad situation. The culture has some serious superstitions about people in her circumstances, people the slavers had in suspended animation, and she was being treated more or less like a leper. At the point I got her out of there, I think they were about to execute her as some sort of propitiation to the gods." Sam was standing stock still, one shoe on and the other in her hand, just staring at him. She was surprised at the situation but even more surprised that she had been in such a complete state of denial that she hadn't seen this coming. Daniel continued, "Surely you can see that, Sam. We couldn't leave her there."

"You brought her back here. She's at Cheyenne Mountain," Sam stated with a false calm that papered over some very strong emotions.

"Yeah."

"And she was in suspended animation. So she's what, only chronologically in her thirties?"

"Actually," he said, dreading the reaction he expected would be forthcoming, "she's a couple years older than Danny."

"You had sex with an underage girl?" Sam exploded.

"She wasn't underaged Sam. I think she was 19 which would make her 20 now. But their years and ours… I never tried to do the exact math."

"Does Danny know his mother is the same age he is?" Sam demanded with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"A bit older. No, Sam, I made a point of not telling him anything other than that I found her, she was okay, and I did mislead him a bit by implying she wasn't in the country. I hated lying to him but I could hardly tell him she was a few miles away but in quarantine because she's an alien." Daniel drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out again. "I knew you'd be upset if we didn't work out how to handle this together first."

"How DO you suggest we handle this?" Sam asked, still sounding upset with him, as she plopped down on the other end of the bed.

"We can't keep him from her forever," Daniel said reasonably. "I don't think we have the right to in any case."

"So what, we trot him into Cheyenne Mountain somehow bypassing all the clearances required?"

"They're not going to keep her there like some sort of prisoner, Sam. They'll either find a home for her on another world or they'll let her live here on earth. It'll be the former unless we intervene and Danny never will get to know her," Daniel ground to a halt with the alternatives thrown down between them.

Sam struggled to calm down. She knew she was being unfair. Her brain and her emotions were at war. She dipped her head for a moment and when she looked up at him, Daniel was pleased to see that her innate fairness and generosity of spirit had won out. "It would be us intervening because she'd have to be watched for awhile, helped. Who else would be willing to take on that responsibility," she said, summing up the obvious. "They were pretty uncooperative about Teal'c moving about freely outside the Mountain and they gave Jonas a hard time. Are you sure they'd be willing to go for it even if we raised our hands?"

"I had some preliminary conversations about the possibilities," he said holding up his hand to forestall her, "I said preliminary. I didn't commit us to anything."

"But it puts me in the same position I'm in with respect to Danny's baby, don't you see?" she said anguished. "You're all ready to raise his kid for him, take on his mother. If it doesn't happen, it's because I didn't want to. I've got good reasons for feeling the way I do. I do," she finished, almost wailing.

Daniel moved quickly to her side and wrapped his arms around her. "Oh honey," he whispered against her hair. "Life hasn't been too fair to you but in the end, it's about making the right choices with what we are given. I love you and I'll love you no matter what you want with respect to either of those decisions but then we'll have to live with the consequences including how we feel inside about the decisions we made."

She was crying now, the tears slipping silently down her cheeks and splashing on his hands. "Oh Daniel, just hold me." They sat quietly for a long time and then she stirred and wiped at her dried tears. "So, let's talk logistics. How do we explain the reality of this woman to Danny and Carmen and everyone else?"

"Her youthfulness makes it impossible for her to be his mother and the slight but apparent difference in their ages rules her out as a long lost twin sister but there has to be some strong connection for us to be taking her in, right?" Daniel said. He'd already thought about this for hours and thought he might have the answer. "So I'm thinking, she's his half sister. That'll work, right?" Sam nodded. "Next problem is this whole damn Guatemala thing. Irritates the hell out of me that we came up with that lame story in the first place. So I'm thinking, she's from some small Indian tribe, up in the mountains somewhere, that didn't speak Spanish. That would also explain her complete unfamiliarity with modern conveniences." Sam nodded again. "I'll work with her, teach her some rudimentary English, basic modern living, before she comes here so she'll fit in better and won't go into complete culture shock."

Sam didn't nod this time. Surely Daniel could see the pitfalls in the scenario he was setting up. "Does it have to be you?" she asked. "I still have clearances for the consulting work I do. Let me work with her."

"You don't trust me?" he asked.

"I trust you. I do. But she's coming in as a part of the family, which includes me, not as your second wife. Do they have polygamy on that planet, by the way?"

"I don't know," Daniel said but his innate honesty caused him to immediately amend the statement, "well, maybe they do, but I think it's only the headmen who get to have multiple wives."

"She probably thinks you're big deal. Are you sure she realizes that this is not what's happening?" Sam didn't wait for an answer, "I think my working with her instead would get some other relationships going."

"And depress any pretensions she might have?" Daniel asked, a trifle sharply.

"Let me ask you a question," Sam countered. "Just what was the nature of the relationship whereby she got pregnant by you?"

Daniel flushed. "We were captured together and imprisoned together. We turned to each other for comfort. She had some young man she was pining for. We never thought we were in love."

"I'm sure you didn't. I'll to be convinced that she didn't." Sam stood up. "So we go talk to Danny now?"

Later Daniel lay in the dark, silent bedroom next to the warm body of his wife staring up at the ceiling and thoroughly ashamed of himself. Why had he sold Sam so short? She had risen to the occasion beautifully. He certainly wasn't on the couch. Should he go for broke? He rolled on his side and ran a hand down her back to her buttocks and gently kneaded them. She didn't move away. Encouraged, he snuggled closer and kissed her neck. Still no rejection and he was sure from her breathing that she wasn't asleep. He slid his hand around and cupped her breast. She said, smiling to herself and glad that he had made an overture, quietly, "Is there perhaps something on your mind, Dr. Jackson?"

"I would really like to make passionate love to my beautiful wife," he said moving in a way that anticipated a positive response. He wasn't disappointed.

Sam and Daniel drove Debri home from Cheyenne Mountain together almost three months later. She sat in the backseat alone next to her carry-on style bag that held a week's supply of changes of clothing and toiletries. There was a shopping expedition planned for the next day. When they had mentioned it to her, she was confused. She already had more outfits than any but the wealthiest woman on her home world.

When they pulled into the garage, Daniel hopped out of the car very quickly and got the door open and her carry-on out before Sam could even get out of the car. He was willing to bet Sam was feeling like they were the chauffeurs sitting up front and Debri was a visiting princess although she had grabbed the shotgun seat like a high schooler to make sure that Daniel and Debri were not together alone in the front. Debri emerged slowly, and stood uncertainly of where she was supposed to go.

Daniel put an arm lightly around her back to reassure her and draw her into the house leaving Sam to tag along behind. he was surprised that Danny hadn't appeared in the garage, unable to wait any longer. He expected him in the kitchen but he wasn't there either. In fact, the house seemed awfully quiet. The explanation appeared in the form of a block lettered note on a legal pad propped up on the table in the breakfast nook. "I cut myself. Carmen drove me to Emergency Room. Danny"

Daniel and Sam exchanged a stricken look. Debri immediately pleaded, "Please tell me what it is?"

Before answering her, Daniel said to Sam, "We don't know which emergency room, do we?" The house was almost equidistant between two hospitals.

"I'll call," she said immediately and stepped to the phone.

Daniel drew Debri away from the phone a bit further and said quietly, "Danny cut himself somehow and Carmen took him to get it taken care of."

Debri gasped and put her hand over her mouth. She looked at Daniel with tragic eyes. Daniel and Sam had both noted that Debri believed she was under some sort of curse and she expected bad things to happen to her. Sam had gotten an answer from the first hospital she called and they were about to go out the door when Daniel's cell phone sounded. He snatched it up and opened it to hear Danny's voice. "Dad, I tried to call you before but your cell wasn't answering. I guess you were in the mountain. Everything is okay. I was hacking at a frozen candy bar. I just needed a couple of stitches. We're on our way home."

"That's good news, Danny. Sam and I and Debri are here waiting for you." He closed the phone and shared the outcome with Debri and Sam. They took Debri's things upstairs and returned to wait for Danny and Carmen, sitting around the breakfast table with soft drinks.

Daniel leaned back and said to Sam, "The two of them rushing off to the hospital made me flash on when she goes into labor. It's not really that far away and there has still been no decision about what happens with the baby. I think they both believe that you and I are taking it just because you've never said anything since it came up and they really want that to be how it works out. If you aren't going to go for that, they need to know immediately. If you are, we have a lot to do to get a nursery set up"

Sam looked upset and said, "I know. You think I don't know."

On the heels of her statement, Debri broke in, "What is meaning what is happening with the baby, with my grandchild?"

Daniel looked at Sam with something just under the surface of his gaze. He was not pleased at all with her unwillingness to get on board the idea that they would raise the child. He decided to let her explain it. Sam groped for words, "Carmen and Danny are too young to be parents. They both need more education to have the kind of future they deserve. We need to decide if we are going to raise the child or they give it up for adoption." Daniel's body language was shouting quite audibly that she was the one who had to make this decision. He already had.

Debri backed up a step and looked at her as if she was a monster. "You know Daniel, one reason my people hate me is because my child is not with me. It was no my fault but it is a very bad thing. You child is your child. I am very sad my son does not know this. Why did you not teach him?"

Sam was instantly irritated. Debri seemed to have that effect on her. Daniel tried to explain, "It is different with us. There are many people who cannot have their own babies. They will give a very good home to a baby and make it theirs."

"No, no," she said forcefully and shook her head. "No. This is my grandchild. It can no go to strangers. I never have my Danny when he was baby. His baby time was taken from me. I will be mother to this baby. YOU," she fixed Sam with a glare, "do not need to worry."

Sam was about to boil over and Daniel tried to avert the explosion. "Debri, that is very fine of you but you would have a hard time raising a child alone. You will need to get skills and get a job."

"I am not alone unless you would put mother of your child on street?" Debri asked amazed and sounding bitterly disillusioned in Daniel. "I bear you child and you would put me out to make my way alone? She never bear child and you take care of her."

Sam was over it. "We need to understand some things now, Debri. I told you these things many times already. The ways of the people here are different. Women are not cared for by their parents until they marry someone who cares for them. We all take care of ourselves. Daniel and I want to help you but when you know enough, you will need to help yourself."

Debri looked at Daniel, "This woman she talks for you? Does she make your decisions? You were a man when I knew you. Has she taken that from you. Perhaps because she is old, she is afraid."

Daniel said slowly, enunciating each word carefully, "Sam is my wife. Marriage is a partnership between two equals. She does not make my decisions but I do not make hers either. You will show respect to Sam or you cannot stay here."

Suddenly Debri stopped listening to him and a huge smile broke over her face. She got up from the table so hastily that her chair crashed to the floor. Daniel turned around to see Danny in the doorway with Carmen right behind him. He was looking at Debri with an expression of wonder. Her lustrous waist length hair swung out behind her as she ran to him. They hugged each other fiercely and then she pulled back to look in his eyes. "Ah, my Danny," she finally said at last and hugged him again.

Carmen said something inaudible behind him and Danny released Debri and turned to put an arm around Carmen and pull her forward. "Carmen, this is my m…my half-sister Debri. Debri, this is my wife, Carmen."

Debri's smile did not reach her eyes and her greeting was cool. Daniel groaned inwardly. Carmen's willingness to give up her child had placed in a very unfavorable light with Debri. She linked arms with Danny and drew him into the living room, saying, "Tell me all about yourself."

Carmen stood staring, unbelieving after the two of them. Sam went to her side and Carmen said softly, sounding hurt, "I just took him to the hospital, I'm having his child, and he ignores me for a half-sister he has never seen before."

"I'm sorry Carmen," Sam apologized. "Debri is a little hard to take. Hopefully she'll change when she gets used to things. Would you like me to help you upstairs?" Carmen nodded gratefully.

Daniel sat with his head in his hands, thinking wistfully of how much simpler things had been before Carmen and then Debri came to live with Sam and him. It felt a little like being a guard in a harem although, thank heavens, he hadn't been castrated yet. A few minutes later, Sam returned and plopped down across from him. "How could you ever have any kind of a relationship with that little ingrate?" she hissed at him.

He closed his eyes and sighed. 


	10. Chapter 10

Sam and Daniel were actually later to look back on Debri's first night with them as a high point. It went downhill from there. She had no respect for either Sam or Carmen. Their decisions about the baby placed them outside the pale. She had been respectful of Daniel's marriage to Sam but that was clearly over. Not only did she believe that Sam was not holding up her end of the marriage, the implication that they could "put her out in the street" had frightened her. She firmly believed that her status as the mother of Daniel's only child earned her certain rights and felt no compunction at trying to secure her future by going after Daniel. Not that Daniel realized that this was what was going on. Some sense of himself as profoundly unattractive to women based not on reality but his geek status in high school, caused him to consistently miss signals.

Debri was an extremely pretty woman, with her shining mane of long dark hair, her large, warm brown eyes with impossibly thick, long eyelashes, a generous red mouth, and a dewy flawless complexion. She had a body to go with her face and an inborn instinct on how to present herself to advantage. The clothes shopping expedition had resulted in a wardrobe of snug clothes that showed off her figure.

Danny though Debri was wonderful. His long lost mother was a beautiful young woman who hung on his every word and thought he was perfect. This was a pleasant contrast to his beloved Carmen who was uncomfortable and cranky from her pregnancy. Danny seemed to be at fault with Carmen without really trying or with Sam who was forever correcting his table manners or cross-examining him about his homework.

Debri had immediately made her offer of raising the child directly to Danny. He thought it was a wonderful idea. When he shared it with Carmen, he met unexpected resistance. Danny was insulted but he couldn't explain why to Carmen who was puzzled by his devotion to a half-sister. It did come through clearly to Danny that Carmen didn't like Debri and this created more problems.

Two days after the hospital visit, they all sat around the breakfast nook table and settled what was happening with the baby. It didn't start out as a summit conference, just dinner, with Jack, Sara, and Danny all present. In the middle of desert, they were discussing college choices for Danny and Carmen. They were in the midst of the application process and having problems because Danny's poor grades made it impossible, despite his excellent ACTs and SATs, for him to get into the caliber of school that Carmen could. The two wanted to attend colleges in the same locality. The idea was if Danny could have an excellent record his freshman year, he could then transfer to her school.

"Daniel and I will take the baby," Sam said without preamble. There was complete silence following that announcement. Daniel's spoon slipped out of his fingers and clattered to his plate. "It's what you want," she said defensively in response to his dampened expression.

"Of course, it's what I want but I would have expected to hear it in a private conversation first," Daniel replied.

"Donna Sam, that is so wonderful," Carmen said, her face suffused with joy. "I have not allowed myself to think anything else would happen. I cannot bear the thought of our baby being unhappy or unloved. I would keep it myself before I would give it to strangers."

Danny looked at her surprised. Carmen and he had also not had the level of private conversation he would have expected. "Are you sure, Mom?" he asked. "I would be very happy for you and Dad to take the baby but we do have other options if it isn't what you want."

Debri smiled smugly to be referred to as an alternative. Sam's expression had become mulish. "If I said it, I meant it."

Debri said, her voice sweet but her message not. "Samantha, you are not a young woman. Would it not be fairer to the baby to have a mother young enough to take care of all the needs." She might have continued but for the look on Danny's face. Her negative characterization of the woman who had first place in his heart as his mother was not going over well.

Daniel swiftly said, "Sam is a marvel. She has always done whatever she puts her mind to. She will do just fine."

Danny chimed in immediately to say, "I didn't mean you couldn't do it, Mom, I just thought maybe it wasn't what you wanted. If you want our baby, it will be the luckiest baby with the best parents any baby could have." That effectively ended the conversation but it was apparent to Sam and Carmen, at least, that Debri would continue to insinuate that Sam's age was a problem whenever she got an opportunity.

One of the men at Cheyenne Mountain who had gotten to know Debri called a week after she moved in to ask if he could come by and see her. Two days later, a second man called with the same request. Sam wasn't really surprised. Debri had had a large number of the younger soldiers and not a few of the more seasoned inventing excuses to be around her. Debri quickly discouraged one of the two who was, bless his heart, blindingly average but the other soldier, Lt. Carl Byster, who was strikingly good looking and clearly going places, received a warm welcome whenever he appeared which seemed to be about twice a week.

As soon as the decision was made about the baby, Jack stepped in to energize Daniel about fixing up the nursery. This led to another trip to Home Depot. Sam was actually nervous about going and Daniel teased her for the superstition she had developed about the place. "I don't see why we ALL have to go," she protested as she stood leaning up against him with his arms around her.

"Because," he whispered in her hair, "we're all going out to eat together afterwards and, besides, everyone but you wants in on the decisions about the color of the baby's nursery."

Sam's only comfort in the third uncomfortable Home Depot scene was that she was certainly in a position to say, "I told you so."

The whole gang was looking at paint chips when Kyle Jaworski and his mother rounded the aisle with their cart. Kyle was delighted to see Danny and the two greeted each other enthusiastically. Kyle, an extremely nice looking boy who had never lacked for confidence with the fairer sex, immediately noticed Debri with real interest.

"And who might THIS be?" he said smiling at her very warmly and moving closer.

Danny stopped himself just in time from yelling, "Keep your mitts off my mother," or words to that effect. Instead he said, "This is my half-sister, Debri."

Kathy read Danny's body language and given who these people were decided she needed to disengage her son. "Hey everyone," she said, acting as if she was just now noticing them for the first time when, in fact, her studious inspection of paint chips had fooled no one. "How nice. I had no idea you had two half-sisters," she added, looking at Carmen whose coloring was not that far off Debri's.

"Actually," Danny said, "this is my wife, Carmen. Carmen, this is Kyle Jaworski and his mom. You remember my dads and my mom," Danny continued, gesturing to Daniel, Jack, and Sam. Sam noticed that Jack was getting a charge out of the entire situation once again and thought she could see some of Jack in the way Danny was handling things.

Danny had forgotten Sara. Kathy was feeling her poor batting average and not ready to hazard a guess. Jack decided to throw fuel on the fire. "Kathy, I'd like to introduce you to Sara, Danny's ex-stepmother and future stepmother."

Kathy nodded, offered a weak smile, and said, "Kyle, your father is waiting for us at the checkout counter." Kyle seemed disposed to argue with her for a moment but read something in his mother's expression that caused him to leave meekly as she waved good bye.

The boy working checkout made a fool of himself over Debri and Sam found herself "not in the mood" on a consistent basis. Comparing herself daily to Debri's youth and effect on the male population made her feel old and repulsive. She really didn't want Daniel to see her naked. Before, the lack of a comparison readily at hand had downplayed her age in the face of Daniel's obvious interest. Carmen's pregnancy had prevented her from making Sam feel like an unattractive third wheel but Debri was a whole other story. Daniel's ego was suffering from her lack of interest and he couldn't help but appreciate Debri's attitude toward him.

Jack dropped by frequently, often with Sara, and he watched the entire show for a few days without making any comment. Debri treated him with exaggerated respect because Daniel had told her that he had been Daniel's chief but no sign of flirtation. She was also very polite and pleasant to Sara who struck an instant chord of sympathy with Debri as another mother who had lost her son. One evening Jack came by alone and asked Sam to go with him to help him pick out a present for Sara. Sam was delighted to get out of the house and away from the local incarnation of Erica Kane.

"Thanks Jack," she said, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes. "I can hardly stand to be there for very long with that woman. It's like a bad soap opera. I mean a good soap opera would have come up with a better explanation for her than she's from Guatemala." 

He pulled into a space at a coffee shop and as they got out, Sam said, "I think Sara's a tea drinker, isn't she? Are you sure they have anything here she'd want."

Jack didn't answer her question and said, "A large cappuccino okay with you?" He ordered her one and got himself a large cup of coffee. After they were seated in a table toward the back surrounded by empty tables, he said, "I just wanted to talk to you alone."

Sam was immediately concerned, "Is there a problem with Sara?"

Jack said, "No. And there isn't going to be one. I learned a lot from what went wrong in our marriage. I'm beginning to wonder if you did, though."

"Jack," Sam said and stopped. She didn't know what was going on.

"Sam, I'll be blunt because it's all I really know how to be. Either blunt or quiet and I can't be quiet any longer. You made it very clear to me what you thought I did to contribute to the end of our marriage. One of the things I remember having vividly described to me was the fact that I was letting my age make me insecure. Let's see if I can remember the exact words. I 'withdrew from you romantically' because of my own misplaced belief that my age had made my unattractive." He paused to look at her straight on. "Do I have it about right?"

"I think I was slightly more tactful but I said it and it was true," she said wishing she was somewhere else. "Not that you were unattractive but that you thought you were."

"What do you think you've been doing lately?" he asked.

"Please tell me Daniel isn't complaining about my performance in the bedroom?" she said aghast. "I glad you two have gotten close again but that's something a man doesn't talk about with his wife's ex-husband."

"He didn't say anything but watching the dynamic between the two of you makes it pretty obvious, if you know what to look for, and there's the way he can't help but notice his sexy ex-lover when she pulls stunts like leaning over him in a low cut top."

"She's utterly shameless," Sam fumed.

"Actually I don't think she's that bad," Jack said, further infuriating Sam, "but she's playing by a whole different set of rules. She's been raised to believe that a woman's value to a man is determined by the children she's born him and that this gives the woman certain rights. And Daniel, by her lights, should be able to have multiple wives. I think the kind of backbone and determination Danny has is reflected in his mother. She's going to go after what she thinks is hers and not give up."

"You seem to know a lot about what's going on in her head," Sam observed.

"I got Sara to talk to her. She really feels a bond with Sara because Sara lost a child," Jack explained. "Let's stay focused. You, Sam, are pushing Daniel into her arms just like I pushed you into Daniel's."

Sam went home full of good intentions, fired by Jack's little speech, and walked right into a compromising scene in the kitchen. Rain had started and a high wind, masking the sound of the car pulling up front or Sam entering through the garage door. Daniel was leaning up against the counter holding Debri in his arms. It was true that Debri was sobbing against his shoulder but it sounded the death knell for Sam's good intentions. "What's the matter," she asked sharply.

Daniel didn't push Debri away. He didn't feel guilty. He was just comforting an upset woman who was part of his family. "Debri's upset because of something Carmen said."

"Really," Sam said without an ounce of sympathy in her voice.

Daniel chided her wordlessly with a reproachful look from those beautiful blue eyes and said, "It was pretty mean, Sam. I think the pregnancy is making her uncomfortable and eroding her normal sweet disposition."

"You were a witness to this mean statement?" Sam asked, coming off like a district attorney.

"No, I wasn't. What's your point, Sam?" Daniel asked, falling into the role of hostile witness without evening trying.

Sam didn't answer. She brushed by Daniel and caught a slyly, triumphant little smirk on Debri's face out of the corner of her eye. She went looking for Carmen and found her in her room, her face tear streaked. "What's wrong, honey," she asked, sitting down next to her and smoothing her hair back.

"Oh, Donna Sam," Carmen wailed, breaking into tears again, and going into Sam's arms. "Danny was so awful to me. Debri told him some lie about something I supposedly said."

"So," Sam said, the aha huge in her voice, "you didn't say anything mean to her."

"I did say something but it wasn't that bad and it was only after she was so ugly to me. She twisted it when she told Danny."

Sam tried to comfort her and after almost 15 minutes, Carmen was calm again. Sam looked at her watch and saw that it was right before 7:00. She stood and said decisively, "You know what Carmen? I really need to get away from here and away from Daniel, Danny, and Debri. I think you do too. How about we go to the multiplex and find a chick flic? There's usually a lot of shows starting a little after 7:00."

Carmen beamed at her. "I would love that."

The two women left immediately, calling out their destination to Daniel who was in his office working on something, but not giving him any opportunity to question them or object. It was a good movie complete with a happy ending, part of the contract between the makers of chick flics and their audience. They left the theater in a much improved mood and headed home about 9:30. The rain had started up again and the road was slick. As Sam was going through an intersection, a car came barreling through on the cross street against the light and plowed into their car. They had perhaps 5 seconds before impact when it was obvious it was unavoidable and the last thing Sam heard before it all went black was Carmen saying, "Oh God, my baby." 


	11. Chapter 11

"Dad, Dad," Danny yelled pounding up the stairs. "We've got to go to the hospital." He was white faced and as distraught as Daniel had ever seen him.

"Is Carmen back? Has she gone into labor early?" Daniel inquired. The baby would be quite premature and was definitely a cause for concern.

Danny looked at him as if he was from Mars and then seemed to realize that Daniel had no way of knowing. "The hospital just called. Mom and Carmen are both there. Some drunk plowed into their car. They are going to have to do an emergency c-section. Mom's got a concussion."

Daniel ran after Danny to the car. Debri had heard the yelling and followed them getting into the car while still demanding an explanation. Daniel insisted on driving. Danny drove like a Kamikaze at the best of times. Immediately before he pulled out, he asked, "Do you have your cell?" Danny nodded. "You've got to call Jack and Carmen's parents."

After Danny finished the calls, Daniel slid a quick look over at his son and saw his lips moving silently. All the trips to Mass with his mother and wife had rubbed off. Danny was praying. Daniel envied Danny the small measure of peace it seemed to be bringing him but all he could do was scream inside his head, "No, no, not Sam. Please not Sam," but he had no idea to whom he was screaming. The refrain never really left his head through the nightmare hours that followed. As sad as he was for Danny's baby and as worried as he was for Carmen, it was his consuming love for his wife that was uppermost in his mind.

Daniel was exhausted. He had split his time between keeping vigil in Sam's room and trying to help Danny come to terms with the fact that his tiny baby hadn't survived the emergency c-section hours before. The Duartes had arrived and Jack and Sara on their heels. Carmen's father had said some pretty nasty things about Sam as the driver before Jack had taken him aside and shown him the police report. The two women had been hit by a drunk driver and there wasn't anything Sam could have done to prevent it. Her father had managed to upset Carmen so much that Angelina Duarte and Danny had alternated sitting with Carmen and her father had stayed out in the waiting room where he was driving everyone else crazy. He was in competition with Debri who kept chanting some sort of prayer or dirge that only she understood. The surprise of the evening had been that before Jack had taken Carlos Duarte in hand, Debri had given him a good talking to. She didn't know a thing about the circumstances of the accident but she had loyally defended Sam. Her effectiveness was compromised by the fact that she kept breaking into her own language but there was no mistaking her passion.

The two women were not in intensive care. Sam had had a concussion and had already awakened only to go back to sleep. Carmen was also not in serious condition physically but emotionally she was in terrible shape. Her hysterical refusal to accept the baby's death had finally resulted in sedation. 

Daniel and Jack had had several conversations that were painful for Jack but he was willing to do anything that might help. Daniel had pleaded with Jack to help him know what to say to someone who has lost a child. Jack kept giving him the same advice. "Just be there."

Daniel stumbled outside hoping that the cool air would revive him and heard Debri follow him. She had her own grief to handle and he appreciated that. She had lost Danny and had thought she had a chance at experiencing his babyhood at one remove, just as he had. He just didn't have any resources left to comfort her.

"Daniel," she said softly. "I am so sorry."

"We all are," Daniel said, "We all are."

She circled around to stand face to face with him and looked him in the eyes, her big brown eyes swimming with tears. It seemed to take a real force of will for her to do it but he could see the resolution written on her face. "No, Daniel," she said in a broken voice. "It is different. They are here because of me."

Daniel was stymied. "What are you talking about? It was a drunk driver."

"They were out in the car because of me. I upset both of them and they wanted to get away. I never intended anything like this," she said earnestly, "please believe me."

"Of course I believe you," Daniel said softly. "You have to quit blaming yourself. No one else does."

"Not yet but when they have time to think about it, they will," she disagreed. She lifted her chin and said, "I want to go back to Cheyenne Mountain and ask them to find me another world where I will not make any more trouble for my son."

"I can't believe Danny would ever go along with that decision," Daniel said, stifling the thought that just for a moment came to his mind of how much easier it would make his life. "Decisions like that should never be made at a time like this, in any case. Wait a couple of weeks and then talk to Danny."

She shook her head. The guilt and remorse she felt was overwhelming. She needed to do something sacrificial, some form of penance to even begin to be able to live with herself. "Debri, I want your promise. Losing you right now could make things even harder for him. Promise me."

"All right I wait," she promised. She almost believed she would keep the promise.

Daniel went back inside and down the hall to Carmen's room to overhear another serious conversation. Carmen was awake again and Danny was sitting next to her. Carmen said, "I should just go back to my parents. There's no more reason for me to be a burden to your family."

"Do you really want to live with your parents again?" Danny asked, feeling hurt.

"Danny, you only married me because I was pregnant. We have most of our senior year left," she explained, her mind occupied not by her senior year that might have been but the free spirit that Danny had seemed to her before he accepted responsibility for a wife and a baby.

"The baby affected the timing but not my feelings about you. I would have kept after you until you married me someday," Danny said stoutly. "Maybe you would never have married me, if you hadn't been pregnant."

Carmen didn't say anything but she sniffed a couple of times and Daniel realized she was crying again.

"Carmen," Danny said, very slowly and very carefully, in tones that sounded like a rehearsed speech, something he had worked out in his mind during these long hours, "our baby can't have lived for nothing. Our baby did one wonderful thing in its seven months of life inside you. He gave us to each other. Maybe if there had been no baby, other things would have gotten in the way and we would have missed out on each other. The timing may look wrong as far as the world goes but maybe it was the only timing that could make us happen. I love you with all my heart and I know you love me. If you go back to living with your parents, it will be much harder for us to be together. You know how they feel about me."

"Oh Danny," Carmen said, "I want to believe you're right. It gives me a little peace about the baby." In the long hours since the child's death she had been unable to keep her mind from circling around and around all the things this little one would never grow up to be and do. Danny was offering a branch with which to begin to pull free of that quagmire.

"Then believe it. Here's what I want us to do. I want us to get this marriage blessed in the church and I want it to stop being a marriage in name only. I think Dad and Mom would let us live together at their place or perhaps Dad," he laughed at the confusion, "Dad numero uno, would let us live together at his place if I took some responsibility, you know, got a part time job to help pay for things."

"What if I get pregnant again?" she asked, suddenly afraid. She couldn't be responsible for destroying all his opportunities as well as her own.

"We use three different kinds of birth control and practice rhythm on top of it," he said. "Carmen, people overcome huge obstacles and we are brighter and more capable than average."

"Danny!" she exclaimed reproachfully. Carmen was too modest to be comfortable with that statement for herself at any rate. She was sure that Danny was far above the average, not only in his demonstrated musical and athletic abilities but also in the very good mind he was finally allowing out of hiding, his innate goodness, and how out and out hot he was.

"Well, we are," he countered her, laughing a little.

"You're sure?" she asked. She was starting to be persuaded.

"I am," he answered. She held out her arms and he embraced her, very carefully and they were quiet together for awhile. Then Danny sat back up and said, "And, something else. I know Debri has made things difficult for you. I didn't want to believe it. She is all I have of my mother. Maybe Dad uno would let her live with him. I think she has been a real strain on Mom and Dad's marriage."

Daniel immediately went looking for Jack and took him aside. "Jack, things have been happening."

"Ya think?"

"You don't know what I mean," Daniel said. "Debri thinks she should go to another planet. She feels guilty about what happened to Carmen and Sam." Jack was puzzled. "There was a blow up with Carmen that Debri instigated and then Sam came home to find me comforting Debri and she got upset. Sam and Carmen left for the evening basically because they were so over Debri."

"She's been a real problem for your marriage Daniel and I was just resigning myself to the need to give you a talking to," Jack said. "Sometimes you are really thick for such a brilliant man."

"There's more. I overheard Carmen and Danny. I think he's got her persuaded to get their marriage blessed in the church and make it a real marriage."

"That's really stupid," Jack said but without heat. "I hate the problems that he's signing up for."

Daniel started to say something but Jack held up his hand. "But, Daniel, Danny's got your stubborn streak and I don't think we can stop him. We can just make it really difficult and make it much harder for them to make a success out of their lives and I don't want to do that. I bet you have a proposal to make already."

"I think we should look at Danny and Carmen living with Sam and I and Debri living at your house," Daniel said very tentatively.

"Because I'm SO old I'm the one man she won't hit on?" Jack asked. He laughed at Daniel's expression. "I know you didn't mean that. At least I hope you didn't." He leaned back against the corridor wall. "There's something YOU don't know that may just make that workable. Sara and I had a real moment a few hours ago in the chapel. Both of us went there trying to deal with the memories of losing Charlie this has resurrected. We don't want to waste any more time letting people we love slip away. I proposed to her and she said yes. Sara and Debri have a real connection and I think it actually could work." He laughed. "Danny needs a church ceremony to make his civil marriage real to the church but as far as the church is concerned Sara and I are still married. We need the civil ceremony. Still, we've decided we still want to renew our vows in the church."

Daniel went to Sam's room and when she opened her eyes again, he told her about the upcoming ceremonies. She dashed tears away and said, "I think that some people can fall in love over and over but others only truly love once. I think Danny and Carmen are one of those couples that need to be together forever. Despite the problems their age will cause both of them just about to turn 18, I can't be sorry."

Daniel could hardly take in what she was saying. It was just so good to see her conscious and talking normally, on the road to recovery. Her bruised face with the stitched up gash on one side was as beautiful to him as it had ever been. "I love you so much Sam," he said thickly. Tears were pouring down his face now. "I've loved before but I'll never love again. You're it. Now and forever." Then suddenly, he knew what he had to do. "The kids are getting their marriage blessed in the church. Now is the time for us too."

One month later as the sun streamed through stained glass windows and a small crowd including Teal'c, Debri, and Carmen's parents sat moved beyond words in the wooden pews, there was a ceremony in which Danny and Carmen, Jack and Sara, and Daniel and Sam affirmed to each other that they had found the place where they belonged until death and beyond. 


End file.
